


The Other Side of Perfect

by paperpenpal



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Cheese, F/M, Familial pressure, Family, Fluff, Friendship, Growing Up, Nostalgia, Romance, School Related Stress, Sylvgrid Big Bang, genre challenge: what if I wrote a ya novel, schrodinger's relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-19
Updated: 2021-02-02
Packaged: 2021-03-17 09:22:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 43,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28846746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperpenpal/pseuds/paperpenpal
Summary: Ingrid is incredibly,incrediblystressed.  She’s got a full plate this year, physics is kicking her ass, and it’s getting harder to hold it all together.  Not to mention the fact that she’s starting to question a future she can’t do anything about because it’s too late to change and too expensive to start all over.  She’s in too deep.  The added pressure of needing to be the model student to keep her scholarship and her RA duties are starting to get to her.  And, on top of all that, her dad keeps calling her.Thankfully her friends are there for her and Sylvain...well he seems to be around a lot these days, doesn’t he?
Relationships: Annette Fantine Dominic & Ingrid Brandl Galatea, Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd & Ingrid Brandl Galatea, Dorothea Arnault & Ingrid Brandl Galatea, Felix Hugo Fraldarius & Ingrid Brandl Galatea, Ingrid Brandl Galatea & Mercedes von Martritz, Ingrid Brandl Galatea/Sylvain Jose Gautier
Comments: 72
Kudos: 44
Collections: Sylvgrid Big Bang





	1. there might be one or two perfect memories hidden here somewhere

**Author's Note:**

> Oh boy, where do I start?
> 
> I wrote this for the [Sylvgrid Big Bang](https://twitter.com/SylvgridBigBang) and there's a very long story about how it came to be and what it ended up becoming that I won't go into here BUT, this would be nothing without the wonderful work of my artist [Artsy](https://twitter.com/artsy_oleander) who illustrated two (TWO!!!) pieces for me (seen in chapters 2 and 3) and also supported and reassured me throughout the process. Truly, you do not know how much your words mean to me.
> 
> I also have great love and appreciation for my beta [Nicole](https://twitter.com/nicolewrites37) who is not only a wonderfully attentive beta but also an amazing friend. If it wasn't for her, I would have binned this piece a hundred times over and it would have never seen the light of day. 
> 
> While I'm here, I want to give a shout-out to [Kaerra](https://twitter.com/Kaerra3) who also talked me away from the writing ledge and the rest of the participants of the BB and those in the Sylvgrid discord for their encouragement and for putting up with my nonsense about this particular fic but also in general. 
> 
> Thank you all so much.
> 
> Oh, you'll want workskins on for this.

There’s this memory that Ingrid has. It’s not a particularly long one. It is not some continuous, old, sepia-toned sequence of events that add up to what she, for reasons not entirely known, sometimes imagines playing through an old-school, hand-cranked film projector that rolls out a somehow seamless perfect movie reel onto a pull-down projector screen that you’d have to jump to catch and tug three times away from the wall so that it stays. It doesn’t play a film that makes sense in her head. It is more like a moment. A snapshot clip with sound. If Ingrid closes her eyes, sometimes there’s color too.

It goes like this:

Bare heels slamming against pavement, shedding the dirt between her toes with every quick-paced step. Her as a little girl in a flowy, green, flower dress, waist height of her mother who is caught in a half-crouch.

Her mother's hands are wrapped in those grey, too-big, near torn, garden gloves, pushing against the denim clothed knees of the overalls she always used to wear. She's stuck permanently in that half-turn, her face turned towards Ingrid and away from the plywood shelves dad built for her flowers. The light catches her golden crown just right enough to burn a lens flare forever into Ingrid’s memory instead of a smile.

She can’t remember the exact print of the dress she wore but she often paints them as wisterias on a canvas of white because her mother likes them best. She thinks that she did not mind the way she felt in it, even though she dislikes dresses now. She’d been more concerned, at that age, with flaking off the drying mud caked on her forearms up to her elbows and on the wild, growing grass on the front tiny lawn of a modest green house and holding a croaking toad up to shout, “look Mom!” 

She might have wrestled Felix or maybe Dimitri into the ground. There’s a laugh from somewhere by many different people that Ingrid’s cast over the years. It’s each one of her brothers, even the ones not born yet. Sometimes, it’s her father’s booming low laugh that follows, but Ingrid knows it couldn’t have been, not when he worked so often. It makes the most sense when it’s her mother’s suppressed giggle, trying not to sound so amused. But, when Ingrid’s feeling particularly heartbroken and wistful, it’s Glenn’s. Nowadays though, it’s usually Sylvain’s, followed by some muffled quip that she can never make out.

It’s a memory that creeps in on occasion without any real rhyme or reason. She does not know why it comes. She just knows that when it does, what follows is a dull ache of something long forgotten but also a warmth that she does not want to shake. 

It comes more often these days.

* * *

Ingrid’s cell phone rattles on the desk in front of her as the afternoon sun streaking in from her open window reflects the glare off the screen. This is not another call from her father that she needs to return nor is it any one of the millions of alerts and notifications that push endlessly through. 

No, it’s simply the subwoofer in room 408. Again. 

At least she doesn’t share a wall with them.

There always seems to be at least one kid on the floor that just _has_ to bring in their ridiculous speaker system and disregard all of their neighbors. Usually, it’s someone who had grown up with no siblings because you would think that anyone who’s had to share a wall would be a little more courteous. 

_You would think._

But these kids, well they’re still kids, aren’t they? When Ingrid actually takes the time to remember and count up the number of months the first years have been away from home, it’s something like four or five at most. They’re barely legal adults.

She’s also entirely certain that there’s at least one person on the floor who isn’t even that. Someone with a late birthday who got into school a term before they should have. Someone who is still _seventeen_ , and on their own.

Personally, Ingrid hedges her bet on the girl that she’s never seen leave her room. Bernadetta-? Maybe? Something like that. All she knows is that the purple-haired girl has a single and that she should have definitely taken a gap year to acclimate instead of getting thrown into the absolute zoo that is a first-year dormitory. 

The music hits with a loud thud. The only thing that drops further than the bass is the corners of Ingrid’s lips while her frown deepens as she glares red into the yellow and green highlights of her scrawled class notes. 

They’re a mess. She’s been staring at them for so long that most of the little pen scribbles blur together, committing only half of the words into her cloudy memory.

She thinks she’s supposed to be memorizing a formula or something. There's no way to be sure anymore.

There is so much to do. Her shoulders tense as the thought creeps back into her through the mountain of heavy textbooks crammed into the corner of her desk. What she’s working on now barely puts a dent into all the things she’s been assigned—another thought to further sour her already bad mood.

She groans a bit as she stretches. Then she waits for the music to ease away and change songs before craning her neck back down to her lap where the textbook she most currently needs lays because her desk is too covered in reminders of things she still has to do.

She knows she shouldn’t complain. That she should be grateful for a desk at all and the free housing provided by her role as an RA but it would be nice to fit more than a single sheet of paper on the school-provided surface. 

All this scrunching over at her lap and peering up at her notebook wears on her body. It's to the point where she’s sure that it’s worse than anything that Catherine had used to make her do on a lacrosse field. That, at least, had the added benefit of getting stronger.

Here, the words just blur and blur, confusing her more with every line she swears she’s on the cusp of understanding.

She _hates_ physics.

She’s not five minutes in before she groans and stretches again, losing her pen to the middle of the tome in order to massage her wrist.

The bass booms again.

There are still a few more hours until quiet hour rules kick in and the sound is mostly muffled through the walls so there are technically no real infractions she can warn against, but it’s still horribly annoying and incredibly inconsiderate. The year before, Subwoofer Kid had been a huge fan of Hip-Hop. This year, it sounds like they are more partial to Dubstep. 

Ingrid hates Dubstep. 

Normally she doesn’t mind _too_ much. Ingrid is used to loud noises. Growing up with three brothers meant growing up with noise, and that’s not even mentioning the way her best friends had bickered. No, her brothers were nothing compared to the fuss Dimitri, Felix, and Sylvain kicked up. Not even close.

Usually, whenever she needs a moment to herself amidst the ruckus, she would just plug her own headphones in. Unfortunately though, she had broken them last week when they had fallen into her coffee cup.

Ingrid supposes she could go to the library but that would involve packing up all of her things and lugging them across campus. An act made especially annoying because she has a habit of bouncing around whenever she gets too tired of one subject to move onto another and the thought of carrying both her organic chemistry and physics books makes her groan. 

She sighs again and cracks her knuckles but before she can return to staring at the page in hopes of absorbing more information, a familiar voice at her open door saves her. 

“Hey. Came to see if you wanted to grab a bite to eat.”

Dorothea stands in the doorway, shoeless in her black tights with her heels dangling off two fingers. She looks just as exhausted as Ingrid feels. 

“You’re a godsend,” Ingrid declares, snapping her textbook shut with a satisfying amount of force, nearly breaking the pen caught in the crease by accident. Were it not for the obnoxious Subwoofer Kid in 408, Dorothea would have heard the snap from the door.

Dorothea smiles a little. “If you were so hungry, you should have just gone by yourself.” 

“It’s not that I’m hungry,” Ingrid says, although the moment she says it, her stomach begins to grumble. “I just needed the extra motivation.”

“Is that all I am to you?” Dorothea laughs as Ingrid shoves the textbook back onto the shelf above her desk. “Extra motivation?”

“How about ‘dear friend who is about to keep me company while I try to fight off an oncoming headache?’”

Dorothea tilts her head and tucks a hand under her chin while she pretends to consider it. “Is that your best offer?”

Ingrid rolls her eyes and grabs the lanyard with her student ID that hangs on the (non-damaging) hook she’s stuck to the wall. “Come on,” she says, spinning Dorothea around and pushing her out of the room. “Let’s head to the cafeteria.”

They’re about halfway through the hall when Dorothea stops them, “Hold on a sec-“ she says but before Ingrid can ask why, Dorothea is at 408’s door, rapping on it twice. 

A giant figure manifests from the other side, eyes wide when they see Dorothea. “Keep it down would you?” Dorothea requests kindly.

The figure nods. “Sorry!” they say, and then the annoying boom from yet another remix of “Turn Down For What” subsides.

“Thanks.” She grins as the door closes, quickly returning to Ingrid’s side and linking her arm around Ingrid’s own.

“It’s not quiet hours yet,” Ingrid can’t help but point out.

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean I can’t ask,” Dorothea shrugs, “and besides, what are they supposed to do about it? Complain that their music isn’t loud enough?”

Dorothea’s right. Most of the residents just want to keep out of trouble. If an RA comes knocking, they’ll often just do what is asked. “I think this might be an abuse of power.” Ingrid jokes.

Dorothea grins, patting Ingrid on the arm twice. “So write me up.”

* * *

The cafeteria is mostly empty at this time in the late afternoon, at least by Garreg Mach standards. The only students that linger are usually those who never bothered to move after a late lunch, tapping furiously away at sticker-covered laptops or staring at badly-penciled notes. Every so often, someone will make the short trek to refill their wasteful paper cups of terribly mediocre cafeteria coffee from one of the three giant tankards by the baked goods station. 

There are different labels for each of them: two kinds of roasts and a decaf option, but Ingrid thinks they all taste exactly the same, which is to say, incredibly watered-down and only tolerable because there are no other options besides the _Nabatean Grounds_ located three blocks off campus and up a hill that doesn’t take meal credit.

Okay, technically, there is a little student cafe downstairs in the basement of the student center but the hours are odd and the lines are far too long.

Thankfully, Ingrid mostly prefers tea.

All the good food stations are closed, which Ingrid had expected. She knows that Dorothea had too. This little trek is mostly an excuse for them to get out of the dorms and out of their own heads to decompress after a long day. 

It has become a near-daily occurrence. 

The only open station worth noting is the little _Anna’s Corner_ that sells prepackaged salads, sandwiches, snacks, and drinks where a lone, bored-looking student employee sits on a stool by the register, scrolling through Crestagram.

Dorothea fans herself with her hand as she sinks into one of the high rise booths in the cafeteria. She’s chosen a place directly underneath the slightly obnoxiously big flags of the three countries on the continent: Adrestria, The Leicester Alliance, and Ingrid’s own native Faerghus. 

“I’m exhausted,” Dorothea sighs, grimacing at the rectangular-shaped plastic bottle in her hand. It’s a pinkish, generic, overpriced smoothie of some sort with a probably catchy name Ingrid can’t read from her angle. “They really overcharge these things.”

Ingrid shrugs. This is not the first time they’ve had this conversation. This isn’t even the twentieth time. “Meal plan though,” she says as she tears the packaging off of her scone and rips a piece off.

Dorothea’s expression stays the same as she cracks the green seal of the cap and knocks a little of it back. 

“I desperately need sleep,” Dorothea says, leaning her chin on her hand, elbow propped up on the table. “If the fire alarm goes off tonight, I cannot be liable for what may happen to a certain resident of ours.”

“That was one time Dorothea and he didn’t know any better.”

“It was one time in the middle of the night,” Dorothea corrects. “He set it off again last week while you were in class and I was taking a nap because he tried to bake a potato in the microwave.”

Ingrid’s eyebrows knit together. “That shouldn’t-“

“He wrapped it in aluminum foil.”

Ingrid sighs. “Better than the time you and I walked into the bathroom and-”

Dorothea’s face scrunches up in complete and utter distaste. “I do _not_ want to talk about that.”

“Fair enough.” It’s not like she really wants to talk about what the first years do in their free time when they think no one will catch them. They really ought to learn some discretion. 

Dorothea sighs dramatically into the palm of her hand. “Oh Ingrid, why couldn’t you and I have rented an apartment off-campus like everyone else in our year?”

 _Money_ , Ingrid doesn’t say. 

“Hey, this was your idea,” she says instead. 

“And it seemed like such a good one at the time,” Dorothea bemoans. “Do you think Annette can handle our wing tonight too?”

“You can’t do that to poor Annette. She’s a double major.”

“I have no idea how she does it. She might be superhuman.”

Ingrid frowns a little. “Annette works really hard.”

“Oh I’m not trying to dismiss her hard work,” Dorothea explains with a wave of her hand, straightening up in her seat. “I’m just saying that not everyone can do what she does. She starts fieldwork next year too, doesn’t she?”

Honestly, Ingrid has no idea how the education track works but that sounds familiar. “Something like that?” she says. “Although I don’t think she’ll be an RA next year because of the time commitment.”

“Will you?”

Ingrid hums. “Probably. You?”

“Unfortunately.”

Ingrid tries for a supportive smile. “At least we’re in it together.” 

Dorothea’s melodramatic sigh tells her that her valiant effort is not valiant enough.

Her friendship with Dorothea goes back to their second semester at Garreg Mach when they happened to share the same rhetoric class. It seems so long ago, although it only really has been two years since Dorothea slid into the chair next to Ingrid, asking her if the seat was taken while they waited for their professor to show up. 

Ingrid had never really been all that close with other girls growing up. She had a few friends, sure, and teammates she liked once she started playing sports competitively, but she was often more comfortable roughhousing and dragging mud around into the living room with the boys she grew up with, much to her poor mother’s everlasting chagrin. 

She’s not really sure how she and Dorothea ended up so close. It’s not as if she and Dorothea have a lot in common. Quite the opposite, in fact. Dorothea is incredibly feminine and has interests that Ingrid does not share but, even so, Ingrid gets along better with her than with anyone she's ever shared a locker room with. 

Well, most of the time.

“Oh, enough of that,” Dorothea says with a quick wave as if it could dissipate the despondent atmosphere of the shared silence that comes with lamenting yet another year of dormitory living, “How’s FQ?” 

Ingrid blinks and tilts her head. “Who?”

“The redhead.” 

_“Sylvain?”_

Dorothea seems unphased by Ingrid’s incredulity, “Yeah,” she shrugs, “FQ.”

“Dorothea,” Ingrid groans, “you know Sylvain. You’re friends. You guys made out at the St. Macuil’s Day party a few weeks ago.”

“Your point?”

Ingrid sighs. Dorothea has all these strange nicknames that she uses for people. Ingrid distinctly recalls her calling Ferdinand a bee and no one understanding why, least of all Ferdinand. 

“Ingrid,” Dorothea says, propping her elbow on the table between them and resting her chin on her palm. The long manicured fingernails on her other hand tap audibly on the surface of the table. “You have to admit, he’s a bit of an FQ. Always in those suits around campus.”

It takes her a moment to make the association. FQ as in Fódlan Quarterly, the fashion magazines she sees in the student center waiting rooms lined with very attractive, suit-wearing men in the exact same poses. 

Ingrid raises an eyebrow pointedly, side-eying Dorothea’s own very smart looking blazer thrown over a tucked-in blouse and pencil skirt. It’s a strong contrast to Ingrid’s grey sweatpants and worn-out hoodie with cracked blue letters on the back that are supposed to spell out “LIONS”. 

“I’m a business student,” Dorothea dismisses.

“So is he!” 

“Okay, but none of my suits are designer and I hem them myself, or I get Hilda to do it.”

Ingrid is about to say something, about to defend her childhood friend when her phone buzzes, vibrating face-down on the table.

“Speaking of FQ,” Dorothea says.

Sure enough, when Ingrid flips her phone over, Sylvain’s goofy contact photo stares back up at her. His bangs are clipped up from his forehead with a barrette, his glasses sit crookedly on his nose ridge, and his face is scrunched up in an exaggerated pout. He had sent it to her while pulling an all-nighter last semester during finals week and it had been too good not to keep. He had jokingly called her out on it. She had told him it was an incentive for him to study. It is definitely not FQ-worthy. 

It’s not worse than the one she has for Felix though. 

He’s video-calling her for some reason. She does a quick cursory glance around before looking back at Dorothea, silently asking for permission, which her friend gives with a quick wave before pulling out her own phone from the bag she set aside.

Ingrid answers the call. Sylvain’s bright-eyed, beaming face greets her. It looks like he’s in the backseat of a car. 

“Hey Ing!” His voice is loud on the speaker and Ingrid fumbles with her phone as she tries to turn him down, acutely aware that Dorothea will still be able to hear every word despite it. “I’m on my way back to campus to drop something off and was wondering if you wanted to grab something to eat later.”

Ingrid frowns and points the camera around a bit to show off her background. “I’m in the dining hall, Sylvain.” 

“Yeah but it’s like four o’clock and we both know that you’ll be hungry later.”

She chews on her bottom lip, trying not to frown. “Hey…” she starts but then stops when she can’t find an argument that’ll work. 

He has the audacity to raise an eyebrow at her. 

”I was probably going to get something with Dorothea,” she tells him. Sylvain will want to go out, likely unwilling to settle for mediocre caf food. “Oh, she’s here by the way.”

She taps the little icon that flips her camera around, Dorothea gives a quick wave and greeting to Sylvain before addressing her. “You should go if you want,” Dorothea says. “I have choir practice anyway.” 

Ingrid resists the urge to bite her lip again. 

The cafeteria food is not amazing. It’s not the worst food in the world but it is best described as adequate on most days so a part of her wants to. The problem is that Ingrid still has a lot of meal credits left on her card and if she doesn’t use them all, the money her parents put into it will disappear into some random budget spreadsheet in the black hole that is GMU’s financial office, never to be seen again.

It seems like such a waste to shell out money just to eat out and it's not like the surrounding town of Garreg Mach is the cheapest place in the world. 

She doesn’t have to say anything, doesn’t have to bite her lip, because Sylvain knows when she hesitates even for the briefest of moments. He pipes up before she can decline, almost begging. “Please, Ingrid? I haven’t seen you all week.”

He’s exaggerating. She saw him two days ago, although, to be fair, that had been a quick passing encounter before he had to run across town to make it to his internship in time. But they text all the time, or, well, he texts the group chat all the time.

“Sylvain-“ she starts.

“My treat. Anything you want.” 

He throws her his halfway-desperate, pleading look. One that makes him look younger and almost a little childish. It shouldn’t work as well as it does. 

Honestly, she could use a little break from campus. It’s really easy to get stuck here, especially without a car and with the nightmare that’s the city’s excuse for a public transportation system. There are just too many people in Garreg Mach. It makes her miss Fhirdiad. 

“Fine,” she relents with a small smile. “But no complaining.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it!” He grins. “Meet you in front of your dorm at six?”

She agrees and hangs up. Dorothea does a passable job pretending not to be interested. 

“How’d you know it was Sylvain?” Ingrid dares to ask as Dorothea sits up straighter, no longer bent over the table looking at her phone.

Dorothea gives Ingrid a look that she doesn’t bother interpreting and makes her regret asking. “Oh, honey, please.” 

Ingrid doesn’t like the implication.

“We’re just friends.” 

The look doesn’t go away but Dorothea says nothing more about it as if sensing that she shouldn’t push, something that Ingrid is grateful for. In the early days of their friendship, it was not so, and it wasn’t until a serious aside that Dorothea began to let up a bit after a sincere apology.

Still, Ingrid bristles. Dorothea might not be saying anything but her knowing, if not slightly judgemental, gaze is only marginally better than her words.

They don’t talk about Sylvain anymore. The subject steers towards something much more benign. Benign to the point that Ingrid forgets the conversation later but is sure that it is yet another one of those conversations they’ve had before.

* * *

**Transcription Beta:**

“Hey honey, I know you’re busy but your dad says you haven’t been answering his calls and you know how he gets. You should give him a call when you find some time. Oh and remember, we’re proud of you!”

Was this transcription [useful](https://twitter.com/SylvgridBigBang) or [not useful?](https://twitter.com/SylvgridBigBang)

* * *

Sylvain’s shirt is tucked in and his suit jacket is draped over his forearm as he waits outside of her dorm building for her. If he had worn a tie today, it is nowhere to be seen and likely in desperate need of ironing after being stuffed into the leather briefcase bag hanging on one shoulder. 

This business professional look on him is something she’s still not quite used to. It contrasts heavily with the stupid casual selfies he keeps sending her. 

It’s not uncommon for people to be in suits on campus. GMU is huge, with three different schools under a single banner, which can make for an eclectic mix of people among the crowds. 

There’s a joke about this actually. A recurring campus one that gets passed and passed around, never to die, like a particularly resilient playground fable. Ingrid doesn’t remember how it goes exactly but the premise is more or less this: you can always tell who everyone is based on their attire. The business and management students are in suits, the nursing school in scrubs, and the humanities students in pajamas.

The math and science students? Well, you can’t find them anywhere. Because they’re dead, crushed under the weight of parental expectations.

The joke doesn’t seem so funny anymore, three years in.

Sylvain looks relaxed, slipping his phone into his pocket as her own buzzes twice in her hand. She watches as a few of the first years give him a wide berth, either intimidated by the tall upperclassman hanging out in front of the dorm, or suspicious of him. It almost makes her snicker when a few of the girls she recognizes from her floor frown at him. Someone must have taught them to be wary of men they don’t recognize hanging around the dormitory. That someone was probably Dorothea. 

Ingrid half-jogs up to him, waving to catch his attention. Sylvain’s little smile grows into a full-blown grin and she can’t help the way her lips stretch out to smile back.

“Hey,” she greets.

Sylvain shifts a bit, tossing his jacket over his shoulder. “Hey, ready?”

She glances around. There are several clusters of people loitering in front of her beige-walled, eight-story dormitory but no one she knows. “Just us again?”

“Yeah, Dimitri’s got this huge project that’s apparently worth twenty percent of his grade and a partner that’s insanely busy and Felix says he’s at the gym.”

Ingrid’s eyebrow furrows. “Again? I saw him there this morning.”

Sylvain shrugs. “That’s what he says. I didn’t actually verify.”

“Maybe you should,” she says as Sylvain begins to walk. She falls into step beside him, which is easy given his slow, lazy strides. “Because working out twice a day almost every day is a little excessive don’t you think? Even for Felix.”

Sylvain seems unconcerned. “It’s not really any different than when we had morning and afternoon practice in high school.”

“That’s only because Shamir worked you guys to the bone. Catherine was much nicer about it.”

Not that she hasn’t had her fair share of double practices but when that happened, it wasn’t usually so damn brutal. Felix doesn’t really have an off switch. She knows that if he’s in the gym again, he’s giving it his all. She wonders how it’s possible for him to look so well-rested. 

“It was mostly to make sure that we kept the field booked,” Sylvain says, “or at least, I think so. I need some justification for all the pain and suffering. And, anyway, I’m sure Felix will be fine. If anyone knows about overtraining, it should be him, given his field of study.”

Ingrid snorts. “Have you ever heard of the phrase ‘do as I say, not as I do’?”

“I’m more partial to ‘do the stupid thing I’m about to do with me.’”

The memory that emerges automatically is a fond one. Ingrid must have been fifteen at the time. Sylvain had somehow managed to convince Dimitri to climb into a shopping cart that he raced around in while she and Felix and Glenn watched, all utterly exasperated but also secretly entertained.

“Trust me,” Ingrid huffs. “I’m aware.”

She wouldn’t trade that memory for the world. 

Lately, their little group of four has become a little more splintered with the way their schedules and programs have diverged. It’s not as if they don’t see each other. Ingrid still spends the bulk of her non-class time with them individually. While she and Dimitri may not be in the same program, they do share the same peak productivity hours, so they often make the time to study alongside each other. She sees Felix nearly every morning at the gym and they often end up grabbing breakfast together because of it. 

Her time with Sylvain is a little less routine since he’s rarely on campus anymore but she’s pretty sure he makes a point of dragging her off-campus once or twice a week. 

But, it’s different. It’s rare that they’re all in the same place at the same time. She misses watching Felix roll his eyes at Sylvain, shoving him when he says something stupid. She misses Sylvain teasing Dimitri into stammers, ears flushed red from implication—misses desperately the ruckus that comes from befriending three very different boys and growing up with them. 

“Where are we going anyway?” Ingrid asks. They’ve only walked a few blocks off campus but Ingrid doesn’t mind wandering farther. 

She never really gets a chance to leave. Ingrid spends all her time on campus but she’s hardly the only one who does. Her entire life is at school. She lives there, has her classes there, works there... leaving seems like a lot of effort when she doesn’t have a reason to. Still, it’s a little sad how little she knows of the city considering she’s been here for three years. She’d always meant to familiarize herself with it more but being a student feels like a full-time job she can’t clock out of.

Sylvain shoots her a grin. “Just a little farther.” 

The further they get from the campus, the easier breathing gets. She had not realized how wound up she had been until he had stolen her away, each step easing her back into a comfortable rhythm of control.

The stress of school does not go away fully. Every time Ingrid looks back, the large bell tower on the church’s Goddess Tower still shines against the skyline, but it feels manageable again and she is no longer exhausted by the reminder that she still has schoolwork to do after dinner.

She wonders, briefly, if one could see the tower from downtown.

Perhaps Sylvain knows.

They pass through a few quiet blocks of residential houses, rented out at exorbitant prices to students, walking past the tiny driveways that come with land ownership in a large city where lazy cats eye them from windows and large dogs bark happily behind the fences. 

This path reminds her very much of the walk to her house back from high school. Dimitri and Felix used to insist on walking her home after practice against the waning backdrop of a setting sun, dragging tired feet behind her, not entirely because they were protective, although she is sure that that was a factor, but because it breathed dying life into a very old routine.

When they were younger, much younger, there would be a whole gaggle of them. They would trail after Glenn, tugging their little hands at his long sleeves. After Sylvain who would press forward, full of loud boyish laughter. After her eldest brother, Samson, who jumped at every low hanging tree branch to swing with his knees tucked high into his chest right before he leaped.

Samson would often be singing, his low baritone tuned to the beat of the slamming from her and Felix's light-up sneakers against the ground as they jumped between the cracks of broken sidewalks where the old thick roots of ancient trees broke through concrete and out into the sun, all while Glenn whistled along with a soft, beautiful, forgotten song.

Walking with Sylvain feels a little like capturing a bit of that. Sylvain would never sing but his laughter would carry them all the way home. He always felt a little bit like a bridge between them all. He is the right age for it, just a little older than Dimitri, Felix, and herself, and just a little younger than Glenn while Samson pulled further and further ahead.

They never seemed far away from her with him around. Because even as the space between Samson and Glenn and the rest of them grew, Sylvain was always right there, no matter the distance. 

He feels like Fhirdiad. As if this few block walk could lead her all the miles and miles back home. As if he could lead her all the way to the front crooked path of the faded green, two-story house where her little brothers would argue about setting dinner plates over the old TV that was always blaring some bad soap or gameshow her mother liked to listen to but never actually watch.

The quiet, easy walk reminds her of a time without the now-familiar tension in her shoulders. It feels easy to walk beside a quietly humming Sylvain with a new lightness in his steps. It makes her want to mirror him even though she has never been that graceful.

“What song is that?” Ingrid asks.

Sylvain’s hands are shoved in his pockets, his back straight and head high, as if he is looking more towards the sky than the hand on the street signal in front of him. His head turns to her slowly, curiously, almost like he’s surprised she said anything at all. 

“Huh?” he goes. “Oh, I’m not sure. I didn’t even realize I was doing it.”

* * *

They round a corner into a large parking lot turned food truck paradise. The entrance of the lot where cars usually come through is blocked by several orange traffic cones and a sign that reads “Fodlan Eats”, the collective that the six visible food trucks belong to.

There are quite a few people here. She recognizes a few from campus who are mingling in small clusters around the lot. Some of them sit on the colorful plastic pastel stools by the trucks and others on the little concrete ridges that signal the end of a parking spot. Many more line up at the different food trucks by where music plays from a large heavy speaker.

Ingrid’s stomach rumbles the second the wafting smell of food hits her nose. It’s divine and she very much wants to eat everything. 

Sylvain quickly scans the trucks before grinning at her. She’s already contemplating what she would order from each truck if given the chance and she knows he knows it.

“Thought you might like it,” he teases with a gentle nudge.

She says nothing but does give him a playful push back as she brushes past him.

* * *

“How’s your internship?” Ingrid asks later. There are no more stools left for them so they’ve settled on the third step of a nearby, largely-unused staircase that overlooks the lot. 

“It’s okay I guess,” he says, reaching over to her plate to steal a bite. She ended up settling on a truck run by a very nice group of youngish but burly-looking entrepreneurs calling themselves the “Faerghan Flavor Ravers.” It’s mostly because she misses home but she’d be lying if she said she hadn’t been charmed by the bright, baby blue graffiti script on the side of the very pink truck. 

It must be some kind of advertising trick. Sylvain might be able to tell her more about it but she’s not curious enough to ask. 

“Kind of boring. I mostly just sit at a desk and look pretty.”

“That really doesn’t sound so bad,” she says. For some reason, her mind chooses this moment to buzz about the genetics module due at the end of the week that she hasn’t started yet. “At least you aren’t too busy.”

“Yeah, it’s nothing to complain about but, I don’t know, it kind of feels like I’m cheating?”

“Wow,” she teases, poking him in the shoulder. “What happened to that lazy boy in high school that did everything he could to get out of work?”

“He’s still there,” he admits, leaning forward to rest his forearms on his thighs. “But, maybe he just wants to stick it to his dad by proving a point.”

“What point is that?”

“That I can actually do things myself.”

Ingrid finishes her plate and places it next to her on the step so she can shift and face Sylvain. He looks calm—sleeves rolled up, top button open, his (probably very expensive) suit jacket laid out underneath her to sit on even though all she’s wearing are some old sweat pants she’s had for years—and he has a light smile on his face. It contrasts with everything she knows about him and his relationship with his father.

“You want to talk about it?” she asks.

He never does. The way his face screws up a bit in distaste tells her he still doesn’t. 

“Not really,” he admits, but the light smile is still there and unlike all the other times he’s thrown it at her when trying to dodge this topic, she actually believes it. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t dismiss her with a light joke or maybe it’s his tone. Ingrid’s not sure. 

Maybe it doesn’t matter.

Something about the way Sylvain relaxes next to her feels comfortable and easy. It feels like she doesn’t get a lot of that anymore.

She decides not to push him. 

It’s the right call. 

“Things are better,” Sylvain tells her on his own after a moment. “But that’s mostly because I avoid the hell out of him. Is it bad that my relationship with my father gets better the further from him I get?”

Ingrid tilts her head. “I’m not sure if I’m really the right person to ask about that.” 

“You and your dad get along,” he says, bumping her shoulder a bit. “Not like I can ask Felix or Dimitri.”

Ingrid sighs, heavy-hearted at the thought of Dimitri’s parents and the number it did on him to lose them. “Yeah, we do,” she says, ignoring the nagging guilt of her voicemail box, “but that doesn’t mean I can tell you what to do about your dad.”

Sylvain grins teasingly. “That’s never stopped you before.”

“You were stupid before,” she says, pushing him away with two fingers as he leans towards her. “You’re better now. Somehow. I credit that to myself, of course.”

“Of course.” 

The settled smile on his face, the one that tells her that Sylvain is okay now, soothes the part of her that never stops worrying.

“How about you?” he asks, stretching his long legs out and leaning his hands flat on the steps behind him.

She tucks her hand underneath her chin, propped up on her knees, and hums, allowing the change in subject. “What about me?”

“Anything new with you?”

Her mood turns sour. She can’t help her frown. “I’m a student in university with a set weekly schedule, what do you think?”

“Hey, someone’s grumpy,” he teases. 

Ingrid feels herself flush. “Sorry.” She sighs, brushing her hair out of her face. “Guess I’m just a bit stressed.”

“When aren’t you stressed, Ingrid?”

“Not everyone can sit around and look pretty.”

“Aww, Ing, I’m flattered. You think I’m pretty?”

She does but she’s not going to tell him that. She shoves him instead with a smile. “Shut up.”

He holds his palms up, surrendering with a laugh. “Hope things let up though,” he says.

It won’t, but she doesn’t tell him that. He’s just trying to be nice. There doesn’t really seem to be a point in complaining about things she can’t control. The semester is only going to ramp up from here and the first four of her exam weeks tick ever closer. 

“Thanks. Me too.”

Sylvain lets it go. He doesn’t say more. Most people would do the same because there’s really not much to say. There’s nothing he can do to help.

Well, except drag her off-campus and out of her own head on occasion, maybe. 

* * *

The light cropping of dust on Sylvain’s suit jacket and the wrinkles she creases into it while sitting doesn’t seem to phase Sylvain in the least. It’s a strong contrast to the way that Dorothea barks whenever someone messes with one of her blazers. 

She half expects Sylvain to tie the sleeves around his waist as he walks her back to campus but he’s too fashion-conscious to do that with anything other than that checkered red and black flannel he likes to wear whenever he’s feeling nostalgic about his grunge phase. 

He tries to get her to stay out longer, to go for a nice walk after eating, but she can’t. She might not be on shift today—Dorothea is the one stuck with what she refers to as the Rugrats—but that module isn’t going to do itself. 

“Anyone ever tell you, you study too much?” Sylvain says as the fading light of the sun dips behind the Goddess Tower they’re walking towards. His steps are slower than usual. It's as if he’s trying to delay her as much as he can.

“Anyone ever tell you that you don’t study enough?” 

“Yeah,” he smirks, hands in his pockets. “You, all the time.”

Ingrid breathes a heavy sigh. “And yet you never listen.”

“Well, in my defense, most of my classes are project-based at this point.”

“I prefer the exams. Group projects are kind of a nightmare.”

And, with the exams, the only person she can blame is herself. They are also less subject to the whims of wishy-washy professors and flakey project partners. 

“They’re only a nightmare because you don’t delegate,” he tells her. “Then you try to do everything yourself.”

Ingrid bristles. “How would you know? We’ve never had a class together.”

“I can tell,” Sylvain says calmly. “Ingrid, you’re kind of...very type A.”

“Well, you’re the kid who never does anything,” she shoots back. “I weep for your project partners.”

“Maybe back in high school-“

“ _Definitely_ back in high school.” 

“-but I really shaped up. How do you think I got this internship?”

She refrains from saying something horribly mean but doesn’t stop herself from throwing him a skeptical look. 

“Okay,” Sylvain says with a casual shrug, pulling the strap of his leather bag back into place. “So it was mostly nepotism and my winning smile but I swear it’s like one percent skill. Maybe five on a good day.”

“You seem to be having a lot of good days lately.”

Her voice is quieter than she means it to be. It comes out honest and warm and it’s because she means it as a compliment. She’s thankful that Sylvain takes it that way, judging by the way his grin stretches across his face. For a moment, she’s afraid he’s going to hold it over her somehow, tease her again. Although, for what, she’s not entirely sure. The feeling passes quickly.

His tone shifts too into something more genuine, something more real, just like hers. “I guess I’ve got to grow up sometime huh?”

She glances over at him. “You _do_ graduate soon.”

“Not soon enough,” he sighs. “You’re coming right?”

“What kind of question is that? Of course, I’m coming, I wouldn’t miss it.”

Sylvain visibly relaxes next to her but it only makes her frown deepen. He didn’t seriously think she’d miss his university graduation, did he? “Hey,” she says, grabbing onto his sleeve and tugging him to a stop.

He turns to her curiously and somehow ends up a lot closer than she expected. Ingrid takes a step back so that he can properly see the entirety of her sincerity. “I know this might be weird since you’re older than me and you might not want to hear this, but, you know I’m proud of you, right?”

Sylvain blinks but then his expression softens and his eyes shine alongside the way his mouth curls into a fond, familiar smile. His voice is low, almost lost to the car that passes them on the street. “I know. Thanks, Ingrid.”

Satisfied, Ingrid drops his arm and walks forward. It only takes him a second to rematch her stride. 

* * *

**Transcription Beta:**

“Hey Ingrid, Mom again. Sorry I missed your call back earlier but I had to take your brother to practice and then time just got away from me. Speaking of time, if you have any, why don’t you give us a call later? Your dad keeps going on and on about his ‘darling girl’ to anyone who’ll listen. He’d love to hear from you.”

Was this transcription [useful](https://twitter.com/SylvgridBigBang) or [not useful?](https://twitter.com/SylvgridBigBang)


	2. sometimes things look better when we walk backwards

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The beautiful art in this chapter is by [Artsy](https://twitter.com/artsy_oleander)!
> 
> You'll also want to make sure your work skins are on!

* * *

Ingrid breathes in the cool morning air outside of the glass gym doors as she waits for Felix to catch up. Her hair, wet and longer than she likes, falls into her eyes as she tries to shake off the residual buzzing underneath her skin from the morning workout by taking in slow, deep, steady breaths as the campus shows its first signs of stirring.

Outside of the mornings, the campus thrums with too much energy. There are always students clustering together as they race back and forth across the quads to class bemoaning the giant climb that comes with placing one of the busiest campus buildings on top of a huge hill, for the kind of quiet she likes. Ingrid is always running around herself, feeling frantic even when she knows she’ll get there early—rushing as if someone will steal her seat out from under her.

She never gets the chance to appreciate how pretty the grounds are or the way the morning sun peeks around buildings, so, with a spare moment while she waits, she takes it in, letting the air try and slow the beating of her rapid still-calming heart. Spring is just around the corner and with it, she realizes sourly, the heavy push into the hardest parts of the semester.

She used to love spring. Now all she seems to do is miss winter.

Before the thought can fully ruin her mood, Felix grunts behind her. “Ready?” he asks, readjusting the grey strap of his gym bag as the metal doors shut close with a hiss and slam behind him. The hoodie he’s thrown on is the same shade of blue as the ones they had in high school but it’s too new and too clean to align perfectly with an old memory of him. 

They used to run on a school track outside in the cold, brisk Fhirdiad winter as the late sun slowly rose before being forced to speed-shower in lackluster high school locker rooms. Now, Ingrid stands in front of a fancy, five-story gym with Felix in the middle of a sprawling campus.

Still, this all feels the same. 

Mostly.

Felix's hair is no longer in that messy bun she'd grown accustomed to and he settles into his frame with an ease she hasn't seen in a very long time but he still smells like the fancy salon shampoo he’s always used and he still hasn't grown an inch.

It's almost the same. It's close enough.

“Ingrid,” Felix calls when she doesn’t answer, too lost in old memories, “you okay?”

Ingrid blinks and then takes one last look at the grounds around them, peaceful in the breaking morning light. 

“Yeah,” she says, hoping to see a warm breath against the cool air that doesn’t come, “let’s go.”

* * *

The nice thing about getting up early is that the cafeteria noise is usually just a low hum of quiet conversations mixed in with the occasional clanging of metal catering pans and plastic plates: a strong contrast to the shouting and vibrant bursts of noise that can be found at most of the other points throughout the day. 

It’s almost like some form of unspoken human agreement that mornings are meant to be eased into.

That isn’t to say that the cafeteria is empty. The university is huge and there are plenty of early risers already mingling about, most of whom are shuffling slowly in line at the coffee station.

Felix hands her his student ID before making his way towards the dining section, looking for a particular seat while Ingrid sets off to find food and coffee. Felix is a creature of habit, always sitting in the same general space. Ingrid half-expects that he has somehow muscled some terrified first year into reserving a seat for him. 

She doesn’t mind it at all. She has no personal seating preferences and it makes him dead easy to find.

When she meets up with him again, it’s with two trays in hand. Felix is easy; he eats pretty much the same thing every day so Ingrid always know what to get him. She’s the one with the wandering palate. 

Their breakfast affairs are quiet catch-ups. To be honest, there isn’t a lot of exciting news and the fact that they’re studying different things means there’s not a lot to talk about in regards to their individual classes either but moments like this are nice. It is nice to start the day with the quiet companionship of a good friend, even when he has to run off first.

Lately, it has been more and more difficult to get up in the mornings to exercise. Not because she doesn't like it—far from it. Often, Ingrid muses that exercise is probably the closest she’ll ever get to meditation. It used to clear her mind. She knows that Felix understands this. But, these days, the creeping mental exhaustion has made the gym just that much more daunting.

Most days it’s actually the commitment to Felix that finally propels her out of her bed. She’s grateful for him and his quiet morning company. He keeps her steady. It is one of the reasons why she always gets up early, regardless of how late she stays up.

Felix chews slowly. His hair, still wet, is tied up messily on his head and he looks entirely too cozy in the middle of morning hustle, content to relax into the low white noise of morning cafeteria chatter.

She wishes she felt as relaxed as he seems to be. She must have pulled something at the gym earlier. Her shoulders are as tense as ever and there’s some residual soreness in her quads that she regrets not properly stretching like Felix had warned her about.

He’s got a cup of tea in front of him, the lid off and on top of a brown napkin to let cool. It is not the caffeine he chases. Ingrid wonders if maybe he drinks the four-spice-blend out of habit more than anything. He always seems put together and entirely in control, although she knows him well enough by now to know that Felix simply looks like this regardless of what actual state he is in underneath it all.

Their relationship has always become one of easy friendship, even when he lashes out. Even when he lashes out at her specifically. 

She remembers the night she finally got Felix. It was long after they met. In fact, it had been a decade after. They were fifteen. Glenn was barely alive. 

The Fraldarius’ were hopeful.

Felix was not.

She found him outside with his hands shoved so deep into his jacket pockets that Ingrid had been sure that he would rip right through the lining. She was the only one to chase him after he stormed out of his brother’s hospital room without a word. She will never forget the way he looked, devastated and angry in the dark alley around the side of the emergency room doors, only steps outside of the glow cast by the too-blinding light of the kind of fluorescence Ingrid swears is only found in hospital hallways, leaning against the cold, brick wall.

She doesn’t remember all the little details of what happened afterward but she does remember the red-faced yelling of something cruel and then of something honest.

They stood in silence after that. For how long, Ingrid isn’t entirely sure. The hours in her head stretch longer with each time Ingrid recalls it. Then, the memory jumps to plastic diner chairs and a white table, tea in front of them. 

Ingrid has long since forgiven him for the bitter biting words said in times of pain. After all, had he not done the same for her? They’ve both had their reasons to be cruel. Him more than her.

These days though, he has gotten much better at keeping himself in check. She knows he’s been more conscious of it, although it helps that there is less to lash out about these days, now that Glenn has recovered from that accident years ago.

They’d all been afraid then, but, now, it seems like nothing more than a throbbing memory.

“How’s Glenn?” Ingrid ends up asking, now that she’s thinking about it. She fidgets with the white sugar packet in her hands, pinching the wrapper between her thumb and index finger.

Felix blinks, surprised, paused halfway through the act of dripping an unholy amount of hot sauce onto his eggs, “Doing okay I guess?” he says evenly. “He called me yesterday. Why?”

Ingrid’s not sure herself. She has not thought about Glenn on his own at length outside of whenever he pops up on her socials. “Just thinking about it.” Ingrid’s gaze drifts to the eggs she begins to absently poke with her fork, before looking back up. “It’s been a while since we last chatted.”

Felix’s eyes narrow just a bit. He doesn’t look too surprised nor does he look particularly displeased, but he’s hard to properly read. “Really?”

Ingrid can’t help the defensive tone in her voice. “What do you mean _really_?”

Felix frowns, but this frown is mostly from consideration. “I mean, you two kind of had your thing, didn’t you?”

It’s Ingrid’s turn to frown. “It wasn’t really a thing,” she says. 

“Then what was it?”

“Do you really want to know?”

He considers this for a moment before grimacing. “No, I don’t.”

“Didn’t think so.” She laughs. “I was just asking.”

“You could ask him yourself. You have his number.”

She could. She and Glenn are friends but it has been so long since they've talked properly and the longer the time stretches between them the more awkward it feels. “I do…” she pauses, considering her words carefully, “but I don’t know, we’re both busy.”

“Everyone’s busy.” Felix shrugs. “But, suit yourself.”

She is thankful that he doesn’t push like Dorothea or Annette might but Felix doesn’t really have to. Given the relation, he probably knows enough. In fact, he might know a bit too much.

Not that there is much to tell. She had feelings for Glenn when she had been too young. Whatever it was between them was something that was never supposed to be. By the time she was the right age for something, they had fallen out of touch, and now here they are three years later.

It surprises her that she hasn’t thought about him in so long when he once meant so much to her. She wonders if all strong feelings can be fleeting. Perhaps, with enough time, they can.

The thought settles heavily in her stomach. 

Felix finishes his plate and puts it aside but he does not leave. There are still a few minutes before his first class. “You look tired,” he observes.

“We’re all tired,” she says.

He rolls his eyes. It is easy to banter back with him when he offers it first. Although, she feels bad about batting off his concern. 

“I’ve just…” she starts, feeling the beginning rumbles of the frustration she thought she worked off during her workout. “I was up late.”

“Studying?”

Not exactly.

“Yeah,” she says, feeling a strange creeping of embarrassment. She shakes off the flush that threatens to form.

Felix doesn’t seem to notice. Instead, his lips press into a thin line. “You should sleep more,” he says. “You don’t have to meet me every morning.”

“Yeah, but it’s tradition.” A fond smile tugs at the corner of Ingrid’s lips. “We’ve been doing it since high school.”

He grunts something. She isn’t sure whether or not to read it as disapproval. 

“Are you trying to get rid of me?” she asks instead, trying for teasing.

Felix rolls his eyes. “You know exactly what I’m trying to say.”

She does. Felix can be difficult to read sometimes. He’s blunt, yes, but also has a notorious case of never quite being able to express vulnerability in a way that satisfies him. She understands this more than most. 

“Thank you, Felix,” she says seriously, “for your concern, but I’m fine. Once these midterms are over, I’ll be able to sleep a little bit more.”

He nods, acquiescing. “Alright.” 

She knows that means he’ll leave it for now. She’s grateful for that more than anything. 

“How about yours?” he asks suddenly.

Ingrid knits her eyebrows together confused.

“Your family,” he clarifies. “You asked about mine.”

Ingrid smiles. “Everyone’s fine,” she says. A slow bursting warmth takes over her chest. “Can you believe my younger brother is going to graduate high school soon?”

“Not really,” Felix says. “It feels like just yesterday he was following us around.”

“Goddess Felix, are we getting old?”

“Seems like it.” 

* * *

**Transcription Beta:**

“Hey Ingie! Sorry I missed your call but things have been so crazy busy that I haven’t had time to even look at my phone, plus I cracked my screen again, you know how it is. But oh! You wouldn’t believe the show I played last weekend! I’m not really sure where we’re going next - hey?! Guys, know where we’re going next? What? Nevermind, I’ll tell you later. Oh and would you call Dad back? Mom keeps bugging me about it.”

Was this transcription [useful](https://twitter.com/SylvgridBigBang) or [not useful?](https://twitter.com/SylvgridBigBang)

* * *

Today is her late start day. Her first class isn’t until ten but it’s too much of a bother to go anywhere else so she usually just stays put after Felix leaves, half-heartedly reviewing at the table. Ingrid’s taken to bringing her class materials everywhere because of it. The strain on her shoulders is bad but the potential for productivity is worth the way it eases the guilt that sometimes beckons in the back of her mind away.

The polite thing to do is to vacate the booth for a bigger group of people to sit but half of her friends end up stopping by for a chat when they see her in the mornings anyway. 

Plus, she’s a stressed-out third year with a ton of books and notes around her. No one would be stupid enough to ask her to leave. 

Sylvain wanders into the cafeteria fifteen minutes after Felix has run off, sliding his sunglasses off of his face and scanning the room. He beams when he sees her and bounds over, tucking his frames in his shirt.

If she didn’t know any better, it almost seemed like he was looking for her. 

“What are you doing here?” she asks when he’s close enough to hear.

His smile twists into a half-frown but he doesn’t actually look offended. “No ‘good morning, Sylvain’? No ‘fancy seeing you here’?”

“Good morning, Sylvain,” she says as dryly as she can through her smile. “Fancy seeing you here. Now, why are you here so early?”

It’s no longer absurdly early, judging by the way the morning crowd funnels through the wall of metal push doors into the cafeteria, but Sylvain has never been a morning person. Still, he’s wearing a broad, handsome smile that makes it seem like he could be. 

“Scheduled a meeting with my advisor,” Sylvain explains as he slides in across from her with a yawn breaks the illusion. “Ran into Felix outside, he said you’d be here.”

“Why’d you schedule it so early?”

“Only time we can meet.” Sylvain shrugs. “My class schedule is all over the place and with the internship, this was the best time.”

“You probably should have gone to bed earlier then.”

“And who was up late texting me last night?” he accuses before pointing at her coffee. “'You mind?”

She pushes it towards him. It’s her second cup and she doesn’t actually need it. She wonders briefly if she only got it for show. Even she isn’t sure.

Sylvain tips it back and grimaces predictably. He always does this, which is why she stopped fighting it. It’s as if he hasn’t learned yet that the coffee in the caf will never ever change. 

“Goddess,” he whines, passing it back to her and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand dramatically. It probably didn’t help that the drink was probably lukewarm. Plus, he doesn’t like all the milk she puts in it. “All this money funneled in here and they can’t even get some decent coffee.”

“Not everyone can be a coffee snob,” she snorts, taking a pointed sip of a drink she doesn’t even really want.

Sylvain leans back against the booth and throws his arm across the back to stretch, making himself look way too comfortable. “I prefer the word pretentious.”

“I’m sure you do.” 

He glances over at the coffee line and seems to think better than to bother, favoring instead on focusing her. 

“Are you here for the food or for me?” Ingrid asks, a little agitated under his gaze.

“You of course.”

She should have expected that answer. He’s so damn quick sometimes that even after all this time, he can still catch her off guard. How long have they known each other again? Practically her entire life. Their fathers were business partners once upon a time. 

She chooses to ignore him. “Have you eaten yet?”

“Does a sip of your coffee count?”

“ _Sylvain_ ,” she groans, but before she can start a lecture he cuts her off.

“I’m kidding Ingrid,” he laughs, raising a palm up between them in an attempt to placate her. “I had a very nice breakfast sandwich on my way here.”

Her mouth clamps shut as her indignation eases, but then she realizes— “Wait, you weren’t kidding when you said you were here for me?”

She had just assumed that it was a convenient coincidence. That he had been on his way to grab some food and bad coffee when he ran into Felix who directed him to her.

Sylvain looks exasperated. “Is it so hard to believe that I just want to spend some time with you?”

She doesn’t know how to respond to that in a way that sounds the right amount of casual. This conundrum has been happening a lot more lately. Sylvain has always been a little like this, sure, but something about the way she responds to him now never sits quite right with her. 

It’s like she can never find the right tone to convey what she really means. It probably has to do with the fact that she’s not sure what exactly she’s trying to say in the first place. 

She settles on: “You saw me the other day.” 

Sylvain frowns. A real one this time. Not the one he puts on for show when they’re both joking around. 

She sighs, frustrated with herself. “That’s not what I mean,” she corrects quickly, afraid he’ll retreat if she doesn’t. “I do want to see you, Sylvain.”

Whatever he had been feeling is shaken off with the appearance of the bright smile of his that she likes so much, filling her with a relief she hadn’t been aware she was hoping for. 

“Do you now?”

His voice is low. Something about it feels different, and suddenly it is as if there’s too much noise around them. The table is too full of her notebooks and stationery. Her phone blinks with yet another school email on the table between them. Nearby, Ingrid spots Dorothea, chatting animatedly with Hilda about something.

This is not the time or the place. This doesn’t feel right. She can’t pinpoint what it is all of a sudden but it’s like there’s too much to look at. It’s too busy.

So Ingrid smiles and remembers how to brush things off. “Of course,” she says as easily as she can. “We don’t all hang out like we used to. I kind of miss it.”

She watches Sylvain’s expression carefully, watches for any shift into disappointment and finds none. Strangely, that does not make her feel any better. “I do too,” he says with a sigh. “Why do you all have the worst schedules known to man?”

“Says the guy with an internship.”

“It’s my capstone!”

The atmosphere goes back to normal.

Ingrid doesn’t know how she feels about it.

* * *

“Felix is working you too hard,” Sylvain says as he walks her across campus to class. He’s got a little glass bottle in his hand of Nabatean Grounds coffee from Anna’s Corner that he refused to let her use her meal points on when she offered.

Ingrid rolls her eyes. “He’s my friend, not my personal trainer. We just work out adjacent to each other.”

“Yeah but neither of you have to get up at ass o’clock to do it.”

“Six-thirty is a perfectly normal wake up time!”

“It isn’t when you were up until midnight.”

“And what time did you get up today?”

He smirks. “A comfortable eight o’clock. Now _that’s_ a normal wake-up time.”

She resists the urge to shove him again. He has no business being this smug when he’s the reason she was up late in the first place. “Exercise is important.”

“So join a sports club. They do all their practices in the afternoon don’t they?”

Ingrid sighs heavily as a tinge of longing strikes her from her old lacrosse days. “I don’t have time,” she says. “There’s a reason I do it in the morning, Sylvain.”

“I thought you did it to hang out with Felix.” 

“There are two reasons I do it in the morning, Sylvain.”

Sylvain laughs and despite her exasperation and her intention to hold her expression, Ingrid breaks too. It’s easy around him, especially now that he’s been doing genuinely well. 

“It’s just kind of a shame,” he says, peeking at something behind her. “Your ass looks great in uniform.”

Ingrid flushes down to her toes. “Sylvain!” 

This time she does shove him.

“Okay okay!” He bats her off with a laugh and catches his step. “But, seriously, I know how much you loved it. I liked watching you play.”

“I did,” she says, trying to shake off his comment, and failing. She can feel the flame on her cheeks still. “I do, but I don’t know. I don’t think I can do it right now. When was the last time you played soccer?”

“I only really joined because Glenn wanted to,” Sylvain admits. “And then I only stuck around because Dimitri joined the team, so it’s not really the same. I wouldn’t mind kicking a ball around though.”

“But you don’t miss it?”

“I don’t miss being forced to run three miles for conditioning, no, but I can tell you do. Why else would you continue to torture yourself so early in the morning? Chasing some remnant of your glory days maybe?”

“Fine,” Ingrid grumbles, not wanting to bother fighting him, even when he’s wrong, “but now I’ve got three reasons.”

“Just make Felix join lacrosse with you.” 

“He’s terrible at team sports. Remember the last time we all tried to play basketball together?”

Sylvain cocks his head, his expression amused and playful. “Was that the time he broke my glasses and I had to start wearing contacts or was it the time he started calling Dimitri ‘boar’ because he thought Dimitri was cheating and ended up ‘accidentally’ beaming him in the eye with a basketball?” 

“I’m pretty sure he was trying to pass the ball to Dimitri, missed, and ended up beaming you in the face, hence the broken glasses.”

Sylvain chews his lip and tilts his head as if he’s trying to summon the memory. “Oh, yeah? Maybe? He hit me pretty hard, my memory is kind of fuzzy.”

“Good thing Glenn was there to rescue you and your broken nose.”

Sylvain feigns offense. “You don’t like my slightly crooked nose?”

“You don’t have a crooked nose,” she dismisses with a wave. “If you did, Felix would never hear the end of it.”

“I do!” He stops to turn towards her in the middle of the quad. Ingrid comes to a natural stop next to him. “If you look closely, there is just the _slightest_ curve.”

Ingrid squints at his nose when he points to it but he’s just a smidge too tall so she has to rise on her toes, which makes him laugh and bend too far down, overcompensating. 

“I see no such thing,” she says.

Sylvain rolls his eyes, snatching her hand before she even gets a chance to turn and continue walking. “Here.” He places her first two fingers on the ridge of his nose. “Feel.”

Ingrid’s eyes widen at Sylvain’s boldness but instead of pulling away, she does what he says, if only because she judges that pulling away abruptly would likely make things more awkward.

She quickly brushes her fingers down his nose and then drops them to her side. “I don’t feel anything.”

“You didn’t even try.” Sylvain pouts, then catches Ingrid’s hand once again to coax it back up to his nose.

Ingrid bites the inside of her lip. She knows how this must look, standing in the middle of campus by the grass and the shade cast by the library stretching towards them with her hand on his face. If she looks out, she can see their shadows mingle, and it looks and feels as intimate as it is, even among the hustle and bustle around them.

She trails her fingers slowly down the ridge of his nose as he maintains a featherlight grip on her wrist. His thumb grazes where her pulse is beating a slight bit faster than normal, and she hopes that he’s too focused on the way her fingers linger to notice. Then, strangely, Ingrid finds herself brushing across his cheekbones before letting her hands fall back to her side, breaking easily from his loose grip. 

Sylvain’s eyes don’t leave hers the entire time she traces his face with her fingertips, nor does he look away when she stops. 

“Huh, I guess it is a little crooked.”

His quiet breath lingers on the base of her palm, long after they part. 

* * *

The heavy uncomfortable feeling that settles in her gut is sure to be triggered by the looming sense of the creeping exam season and not anything else, Ingrid swears. It clouds the rest of Ingrid’s day, long after Sylvain runs off to do whatever it is Sylvain still has to do on campus. The early easy days of school have long since been left behind with the ugly drapes of her high school graduation gown and the way each class slowly but surely trucks through syllabi. 

Not that high school was particularly easy, mind. After all, Ingrid never ever slacked off. She has always been someone who prides herself on hard work and determination. A determination that some—mostly Felix—would call stubborn.

But it wasn’t quite this. It wasn’t exam upon exam, lab partners that don’t text back, balancing classes that didn’t communicate, and the desperate need to do her best to align her schedule up with her friends for fear of never seeing them.

Okay, so it was a lot like this but something about it feels more unbalanced now, like she’s holding too many plates with too few hands.

It doesn’t help that she hasn’t had the chance to see Dimitri in person all week, something which thoroughly sours her mood. It doesn’t help that Felix always runs off before they get to finish a conversation so as to not miss class. She refuses to allow Sylvain and his stupid slightly crooked nose any more room in her head.

It’s silly because she’s lucky enough that her closest friends decided to all go to the same institution. They could be much further away but maybe it’s easier to let people fall to the wayside with the illusion of closeness because it would be easy to make the excuse that she could just try to meet up with them tomorrow.

It’s why she appreciates her time with Felix every morning and the way Sylvain badgers her. It’s why she makes a point to schedule study time with Dimitri whenever possible even when it’s inconvenient for her. 

Still, this distance is not something she is used to. She sees them all often enough, more so than her family—a family who stuffs her voicemail box full of messages she still hasn’t gotten a chance to properly listen to. The distance shouldn’t bother her as much as it does.

She feels silly for it though because it’s not like she doesn’t have a life separate from her boys. Ingrid shares a kinship with classmates that the boys don’t know through the shared struggle of Hanneman’s lectures. Dorothea barges into her dorm room to drag her out into the cafeteria so that they can curse the frustration that comes from corralling a bunch of first years into shape, and she and Annette occasionally lament about the utter exhaustion they feel from working constantly.

It’s just strange to no longer share the exact same circle of friends with her childhood friends. Dimitri has built strong bonds away from her with people she is only casually acquainted with, spending most of his lunches with Dedue instead of with her. Sylvain is hardly ever on campus anymore and whenever he is, he’s usually with Hilda or Lorenz chatting about his internship at Gloucester International and Felix spends a lot of time with his fellow kinesiology majors, Leonie and Caspar, talking about class. 

It makes her wonder if this what growing up is like. If all it means is growing apart.

After all, when was the last time she’s seen Mercedes since her friend had graduated?

* * *

**Transcription Beta:**

“Ingie, you are not going to believe where I am. Call me back.”

Was this transcription [useful](https://twitter.com/SylvgridBigBang) or [not useful?](https://twitter.com/SylvgridBigBang)

* * *

Later on, between classes and back on her dorm floor, a frazzled Annette rushes towards the elevator doors where Ingrid’s waiting. It takes Ingrid a moment to recognize her because the only visible part of Annette are her legs since the rest of her is covered by the absolutely massive bag of laundry cradled in the girl’s hands. 

“You need help with that?” Ingrid offers, already reaching her own hands out to hover around the bag for fear of it tipping her friend over. Annette is really good at a lot of things but she also has a reputation for being monumentally clumsy. 

Annette peers around the side of the free laundry bag the school gave them at the beginning of the year but it’s so big only one eye manages to catch Ingrid’s. “Oh, I think I got it, Ingrid,” Annette says huffing as she shifts so that she has better leverage over the giant pile of dirty clothes.

“It’s okay to ask for help you know,” Ingrid says gently, hands still out in case Annette changes her mind.

Annette shakes her head, “I know,” she says, “but I do have it. Would you mind pushing the button for me when we get in though?”

“Of course.”

The elevator doesn’t take long and they both shuffle in. 

“I don’t know how I let it get this bad,” Annette sighs. “I didn’t even realize! I blinked and then suddenly, I’ve got this huge monster.”

“You’ve been busy,” Ingrid tells her. “We all have.”

“I’m just-“ Annette makes a sound like she’s blowing the hair out of her face but Ingrid can’t tell for sure given the way Annette refuses to drop the bag to the ground. “I can’t wait to graduate.”

Ingrid frowns, but before she can respond the elevator doors open and Annette slips out. 

Ingrid hadn’t noticed but apparently, she hadn’t hit the button for her own floor. As the elevator glides back to the ground floor, Ingrid chews over the brief exchange they had shared and wonders why it bothers her so much.

* * *

Dorothea leans against Ingrid’s bed from where she sits on the floor, massaging her feet. 

“Why do you wear heels every day if it bothers you so much?” Ingrid can’t help but ask from where she sits at her desk chair, staring down at her friend. She’s seen plenty of business students in perfectly reasonable shoes. 

Dorothea heaves a heavy exasperated sigh. “Dress for success, my dear,” she says simply, gesturing to her suit before returning to massaging her feet. 

“Okay, but you can do that without heels.”

“I can most certainly _not_ do that without heels,” Dorothea snaps. “Not when I’m trying to score an early internship for my capstone.”

Ingrid ignores Dorothea’s bad mood. “Are all your capstones just internships? Is that how it works?”

“We all are expected to have internship experience before we graduate, yes.” Dorothea stands to shrug her blazer off with a sigh, draping it carefully on Ingrid’s well-made bed before she continues. “If we can’t get one on our own, the program will try to arrange one for us.”

“So why not have the program arrange one for you?”

“Because I want a good internship Ingrid,” she explains in a tone that reminds Ingrid very much of the tone one might take with a child. “That’s the thing with business, it’s all about who you meet. That’s what sets you up for success. Not everyone can have rich fathers in high places.”

She’s talking about Sylvain but also about Dimitri and Felix. Ingrid’s frown deepens and Dorothea turns back towards Ingrid, wide-eyed. “Oh, Ingrid. I didn’t mean–”

“No, it’s okay,” Ingrid says. “I know what you mean.”

Her father does not have any deep pockets nor is he in a high place. He might have been once, but that was before her. She’s friends with Sylvain, Dimitri, and Felix because of lucky scholarships from very old connections that strain further and further away every year and the aid of pure, wonderful chance.

Dorothea is different though. Ingrid knows enough about Dorothea to know that. “They’re your friends,” Dorothea says before sinking back onto the floor. “I didn’t mean to sound so bitter.”

“You're my friend too, Dorothea,” Ingrid tells her, moving to sit next to her. Ingrid stretches her legs out beside Dorothea’s long ones as they lean against the side of the mattress. “You can vent if you’d like.”

“It just makes me sound so petty.”

Ingrid shakes her head. “It’s not petty. It’s just...kind of the way things are.”

That’s an understatement, she knows, but Ingrid doesn’t know how to talk about this. She’s not really sure she wants to.

Dorothea nods, sighing as she tilts her head back and up towards Ingrid’s ceiling. “Still, it’s not a good look for me. I should look forward, into the future, or whatever, and focus on that.”

Ingrid smiles. “Yeah, the future. The one that’s flying straight at us.” 

“We still have a year,” Dorothea says before moaning, “oh good Goddess, we only have a year.”

Ingrid sighs heavily and buries her forehead into her friend’s shoulder. “Don’t remind me.”

She feels Dorothea’s hand come up and stroke her hair. “You’re the one that brought it up.”

“An action that I regret immensely.”

They both groan and sink slowly into the fuzzy green rug Sylvain gave her for her birthday last year, wishing the ugly, awful thing would swallow them whole.

* * *

Annette finds them both sprawled out on the floor in opposite directions, their heads next to each other and blinking up at the tiled ceiling half an hour later.

Ingrid distinctly recalls a story about one of the tiles falling and hitting someone in the chest while they were sleeping. She and Dorothea are positioned perfectly so that if a very specific tile were to fall, it would beam them both in the face.

A mercy perhaps?

The longer they stay there, unmoving and exhausted, the harder it is to get up. Ingrid desperately needs to get up, so says the nagging draw of the guilt that comes from procrastination. She should definitely be studying but Dorothea is a terrible terrible influence and as ugly as the rug is, it is very comfortable. 

“Hey guys,” Annette greets with a smile. At the same time Ingrid can hear the little annoying beep of her cell phone from somewhere in her room. For the briefest of moments, Ingrid considers asking Annette to throw the damned thing out the window. “Am I interrupting something?

Dorothea, who has her legs stretching towards the direction of the open door where Annette is, drops her own phone flat against her belly to push up on her elbows so she can meet Annette’s gaze. “Just lamenting an unenviable future.” 

Annette giggles. “Oh, so the usual then.” 

Ingrid finally brings herself to sit up, crossing her legs with a groan and wincing as she stretches her arms back. She’s still sore from this morning and, if she’s being honest, the day before. “Did you need something, Annette?” she asks as Annette frowns.

“Oh, I was just wondering if someone could cover for me for a few hours tonight,” she says before the teasing smile returns to her face, “but it looks like you both might be busy…”

Dorothea shakes her head, “I would but I have an Italian study group to get to.”

Ingrid snaps her head down at Dorothea. “Aren’t you fluent?”

“I have an Italian tutoring session to get to,” she corrects, checking her watch. “One that I am late to.”

Dorothea makes no show of getting up from the floor.

“Dorothea,” Ingrid scolds.

The girl heaves a heavy sigh and stands. “I’m going, I’m going,” Dorothea says, brushing off her skirt and gathering her things. “Why did I agree to this?”

“Because you’re a nice person?” Annette says, amused. “And you like to help people?”

Dorothea shakes her head. “I don’t know how you do it, Annette,” she grumbles. “Teaching is _exhausting_.”

“Kids are easier,” Annette says.

Dorothea lets out a decidedly unladylike snort. “Doubtful,” she says before moving towards the door. “Sorry I can’t help, Annette.”

Ingrid finally chimes in, “I can do it.” She raises her hand as a reflex. “I wasn’t planning on going anywhere tonight anyway.”

“Thanks, Ingrid,” Annette says. She steps aside to let Dorothea, who bids them both goodbye, through. “Remind me to write it on the whiteboard.”

Ingrid nods before grimacing while stretching her legs back out, trying to shake off the way her calves tighten.

“Are you sure you’re okay with it?” Annette asks again, sounding wary and eying Ingrid on the ground.

“It’s fine. Gives me an excuse to stay in if Sylvain calls and I really can’t afford to keep procrastinating.”

Annette’s relieved smile brightens the room. “Thanks again, Ingrid! I accidentally double-booked my acapella group practice and I really didn’t want to skip it again.”

“No problem.” It really isn’t that big of a deal. All Ingrid needs to do is stay in the building. Technically, Annette’s in the other wing but they share the same floor and cover for each other all the time. “Hey, Annette,” she starts before her friend can leave.

“Yeah?”

“How do you manage to squeeze in acapella and all your classes?”

Annette looks sheepish. “I don’t always,” she admits. “I end up skipping a lot of practices or we have to schedule around me but it’s supposed to be for fun so I try not to stress about it.”

Ingrid hums. Her mind conjures an image of greenery, of the way dry grass feels hot underneath summer sun, and the sweat that comes with running back and forth on a field and collapsing into a circle at the center while a whistle signals a break. 

Annette furrows her brow. “Something wrong?”

“What? Oh, no. Just wondering.” Ingrid says as the image, half-formed, fizzles and dies. “You’re just so busy all the time. I don’t know how you do it.”

“Mostly by sleeping very little,” Annette half-jokes.

Ingrid laughs. “People keep telling me to sleep more. I think Felix is trying to get rid of me.”

“Who has the _time?_ ” Annette groans, flopping into Dorothea’s vacated spot on the floor dramatically, tucking her knees beneath her. “No one is getting enough sleep.” 

“That’s what I said.” Ingrid smiles. “Although I think Felix does actually get an adequate amount.”

“How?!” Annette practically wails as she sinks lower down until she’s lying flat next to Ingrid’s knees. The rug just seems to have this effect on people. “Why doesn’t he ever look like he’s tired? How does he do it?”

“He gets tired.” Felix is human after all, even if he won’t admit it. “He’s just very good at hiding it. He’s good at hiding a lot of things.”

“You meet him every morning don’t you?” Annette asks. “You leave so _early_.”

“I do. We work out together.”

“I can’t believe you have time to go to the gym. Just the thought-” Annette pales and shakes her head. “How do _you_ do it?”

“Well, for starters, neither of us decided to double major,” Ingrid says slyly. She reaches over as Annette begins to groan and pats the poor girl on the shoulder. 

“It’s too late to stop,” Annette mumbles as she turns face down to speak into the fuzzy rug. “I’m only three classes away, I might as well push through.”

Ingrid knows the feeling. She also knows that there’s really nothing she can say that’ll make this go away. Still, she does have something that might help. “You want some chocolate?”

* * *

Ingrid’s phone blinks with five notifications. Now that she's been relieved from covering for Annette, she’s buried herself deep underneath her covers. The only reason she notices the notifications is because a new one comes in, sparking light into a pitch-black room. 

It’s a bad idea to keep her phone charging next to her pillow because it’s all too easy to reach over and glance at it and the second she does, it is all too easy to stare at the collapsed notification stack and tap it.

At least the clock reads before midnight this time. 

It didn’t actually take her that long to finish the module she’d been putting off all week once she got into it but her phone kept blinking and distracting her until she finally had to mute the Faerghus Four group chat when she got too fed up. 

It’s mostly Sylvain. He’s the kind of guy that sends four messages to communicate one idea because he’s either genuinely less busy than everyone else or because he’s the least disciplined out of all of them. 

It’s also her own fault. She used to be so much better at keeping on task but, lately, she finds herself bending to the way her phone rattles the table when the little bubbles pop in.

It hadn’t even been a particularly stimulating conversation but it still made her laugh and that was enough for her to put off work for an hour more than she intended to.

The responsible thing to do is to flip her phone down. It wouldn’t be difficult to simply roll over and face the wall, leaving the phone behind her as she drifts off into a pleasant slumber. That would be the High School Leadership Member Ingrid Galatea thing to do.

But this Ingrid does not do that. This Ingrid is no longer the High School Leadership Member Ingrid Galatea. This Ingrid is the Ingrid that was almost defeated by Organic Chemistry last semester. 

Ingrid rolls to her side where the phone sits, the charging cord stretching out towards the outlet below her bed and props it against the mattress with one hand. She makes a single concession with herself. She tells herself she can read the messages but that she can’t respond to them and with that in mind, she swipes through her lockscreen where a picture of her brothers smile at her and into her homescreen where Dimitri, Felix, and Sylvain grin at her.

Her phone, as Dorothea has delightfully pointed out, is full of boys.

She frowns at the sight of four little red number alerts at the corner of separate applications and proceeds to go through the task of clearing them all. She tells herself it’s so she doesn’t have to bother in the morning despite the fact that she is more than likely to wake up to a few more. 

There’s a school email that she trashes immediately—something about a dance team that has nothing to do with her. Another is a notification from a game she never plays but never bothered to delete that tries to guilt her into feeding her virtual horse again. There’s a missed call from her father that she feels bad about but it’s way too late to call him now. The last two are texts. One from Sylvain and one from Glenn.

She opens the one from Glenn first. 

She’s not really sure when the last time she saw Glenn was and she wasn’t kidding when she told Felix it had been a while since they last chatted. He hadn’t gone home for the most recent holiday, too busy with work and they only keep in touch sporadically. Their conversations usually spin off from the rare social media post one of them makes.

It is so different than when she used to see him every day.

When she used to think of him every day. 

It’s entirely curiosity and nothing else that fuels her fingers opening the message.

He’s sent her a picture. It’s a selfie with another person and the second she registers the person Glenn’s with, she shoots upwards into a sitting position, both fingers tapping on her phone quickly.

Is that my brother?

She knows it is. She would recognize her older brother anywhere. She’s just confused as to why he and Glenn are together. Last she talked to Samson, he was gigging across the continent with a broken phone screen, booking shows with his band wherever he could.

Glenn does not respond and after a minute of waiting, Ingrid shifts, choosing to open Sylvain’s text.

you going to ignore this nose?

She can’t help but laugh.

yes

Sylvain’s response comes within seconds.

;(

Then:

you busy?

She bites her bottom lip.

Technically no

The bubbles on the messaging app pop up and then disappear. Then, a moment later, Sylvain’s goofy face lights up on her phone again. She fumbles as she swipes to answer.

“Hello?” she greets, naturally quiet from the late-night hour and the closeness of the microphone. She scoots to lean her back against the headboard.

“You said you’d ignore this nose,” she hears on the other side, “thought maybe I’d see if you’d ignore this voice.”

Despite herself, Ingrid can’t help but bark out a laugh. “ _That’s_ the line you’re going with?”

“Got you to laugh didn’t I?” 

She’ll give him that much. 

Sylvain’s voice always feels faraway through her phone even when she holds it directly against her ear, closer than he ever gets in person. She thinks that maybe it's the fact that she can’t see him that makes him feel so far.

Or maybe it’s because it reminds her of all the sporadic calls they’ve had, always like this, always at night, after he graduated high school and left her behind.

Or maybe it’s just simply the limitations of cell phone microphones. 

“Did you need something?” she asks, pushing the thought away.

“Wanted to hear your voice. You’ve been ignoring our group chat. Dimitri and I are having a healthy debate about whether or not Felix is secretly dating someone since he keeps turning down dinner. You’re our tie-breaker. I pinged you like eight times.”

“I told you I had to study,” she says in a tone that she hopes conveys her eye-roll. She pulls her blanket over her lap and begins to pick at it. She wonders what he’s doing. 

Her mind conjures an old image. Another conversation they’ve had like this, except with their cameras on.

It’s Sylvain at the kitchen counter of his small downtown apartment, wearing some grey sleep hoodie that hasn’t been stolen or given away. His shaggy hair probably still wet from ridding it of the infinite amounts of product he teases in it. There’s an abandoned bowl of cereal that he’s pushed away in favor of speaking to her, his chin propped up on his hand, elbow on the counter. It’s her favorite image of him. It always comes to mind when they’re on the phone.

“He’s not, by the way,” Ingrid continues as her mind wanders. “He’s turning you down because he’s got a class then.”

Sylvain sounds skeptical. “At six in the evening?” 

She doesn’t point out that evening classes are indeed a thing. She remembers poor Ashe’s 6-10 writing class that makes his RA schedule impossible to work around.

“Not a class,” she says instead. “He teaches boxing at the gym. I asked him about it earlier because-“

Sylvain snorts, interrupting, “-Did you scold him for overtraining?” When she doesn’t answer him, his voice rings back in, triumphant. “Hah, knew it.”

“Do you want me to scold _you_?”

“Please no,” he pleads. “I’ve been good lately, Ing. I swear.”

“Outside of the fact that you’re calling me at–“ she pulls her phone away from her ear and frowns when she sees the time, ticking ever closer to midnight, “–eleven forty at night.” 

“Study break,” he dismisses. “You know you’re supposed to take a break every hour or so right? Otherwise, nothing retains.”

“Do you have a source to cite or is that just you talking?”

“How about the RA I had my first year?”

“You mean the one who taught you what a fireslap was?”

“Hey, the fireslap is a time-honored tradition. It’s practically a rite of passage, passed down every year in the hallowed halls of the first-year dormitories.”

“Not if I have anything to say about it.” 

Sylvain laughs at the way Ingrid grumbles. “Hey,” he says, and she can just imagine the grin he has on now, “do you think my dad’ll be mad at the fact that that’s the only thing I learned my first year?”

_Absolutely._

“Well maybe if you choose something you actually cared about,” Ingrid says instead, “you might remember something.”

“Not my fault I had to take all those finance classes.”

“Nothing sounds more miserable than finance.”

“Eh, could be worse. Could be accounting. But, speaking of things we care about, how about you?”

A slow sense of _something_ begins to stretch from her fingertips towards her chest. Ingrid pauses and furrows her brow as she tries to stamp it out but then remembers that he can’t see her. “Pardon?”

“How’s _physics_ going?”

Ingrid groans. “I should have taken it my second year with everyone else,” she says, slumping further into her headboard as the brief feeling of warmth is displaced by the thought of Hanneman’s droning lectures. “But I was trying to put it off for as long as possible. Now I’m not even sure if I actually need it anymore.”

“What do you mean?” Sylvain must have stopped doing whatever it was he was doing because his shuffling background noise disappears. “Did they change the requirements for med school?”

“No, it’s not that,” Ingrid says with a sigh. She doesn’t really want to get into it. She doesn’t have the time or the desire to even consider that right now.

“You gonna elaborate?”

“Not when I was supposed to be asleep fifteen minutes ago.”

“I’m sure you got it, Ingrid,” he says, sounding kind. “You can pick it back up tomorrow.”

He thinks she’s still studying, she realizes. He doesn’t know that she’s put off sleep to answer his call. She didn’t really even register it herself until now. Sure, she had been up already but-

“Yeah probably,” she says, quieter than before. If he catches the difference, he doesn’t make mention of it.

“Promise you’ll go to bed?” he says. “Then, next time, you can elaborate.”

“Yeah,” she breathes quietly into the microphone. “Next time.”

* * *

Next time doesn’t happen immediately. Ingrid’s classes pull forward at a steady, rising pace and she gets too busy to think too much about anything else other than what’s directly in front of her. The bell icon on the Faerghus Four group chat keeps its little red slash. She has the shortest most mundanely pleasant exchange with Glenn about the picture he took with her brother but then things go silent from both their ends again like they always and forever will do. Her father keeps catching her voicemail box. 

That last one she feels guilty about.

It’s not that she’s avoiding him necessarily but she’s also not in a hurry to catch him. Her father is a busy man; his only breaks are in the downtime between customers when Ingrid’s usually in class or studying or trying to wrangle a bunch of first years into some semblance of courtesy.

That last one is more difficult than it should be. 

Sylvain’s messages also keep poking at her but she doesn’t respond to them either. Those though, well, she can’t seem to help the way she looks for them. 

* * *

**Transcription Beta:**

“Hey Darling, I know you’re busy so don’t worry about calling me back, but it’d be nice to hear your voice when you get a chance.”

Was this transcription [useful](https://twitter.com/SylvgridBigBang) or [not useful?](https://twitter.com/SylvgridBigBang)


	3. we used to do this all the time, i wonder why we stopped

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
>  By [ Artsy](https://twitter.com/artsy_oleander)  
> [Have a listen.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDpKTi_Pr4M&ab_channel=DermotKennedy)

* * *

Sitting cross-legged on her bed, hair tied up into a messy bun, Ingrid murmurs what she thinks are the answers to her flashcards into the side of the green and gold Garreg Mach University-branded pen she’s chewing.

She never studies on her bed if she can help it. It’s just that her desk is covered with books, stacked and discarded to the point where she can no longer see the surface of her very beat-up, twenty-year-old desk. She’s heard a million times from a million people how bad it is for your brain to mix work and sleep. She can hear her mother’s voice again, echoing in the back of her brain, next to where a reminder to return her father’s call when she gets a spare moment prickles the hair on the back of her neck.

There are no spare moments during exams and when she’s feeling particularly frustrated, the bald-faced lie told to her during orientation first year likes to mock her. 

_“We do our best to make sure the departments communicate so that your exams will be more spaced out_ .” Hanneman had said. “ _So as to not overwhelm you._ ”

Hanneman is not a cruel man. In fact, Ingrid quite likes him as a teacher. It’s just that the memory of his tone that day has long since been twisted by bitterness and frustration, twisted into some amalgamation of all the worst traits of her favorite teachers until they all become some larger-than-life monstrosity instead of the actual person themselves and Ingrid has to remind herself that the mocking voices aren’t real.

It makes it hard to concentrate. Ingrid’s eyes keep drifting as she thinks, trying to recall answers to cards she’s seen a hundred times before, drilling and redrilling them into her head. She should shut her eyes. She should shut them and dig deep into how her mind files away factoids in the form of three-by-five index cards but, instead, she seems to fixate naturally on the tiny little leaves sprouting out through the smattering of pebbles laid on top of the dirt of a small pot holding a single fading green succulent.

She had got it on a whim and thinks of it every time her mother sends her a picture of the flowers in the garden or the fruit trees in the backyard that Ingrid used to climb on when she was small. They never really had the space for her mother’s green thumb. They still don’t. Instead, the plants are potted and stored everywhere and anywhere they can fit, growing on all their half-rotted window sills and hanging off the sheet metal shed in the back or else given as gifts to guests. Ingrid’s sure that Dimitri’s gotten so many they probably fill up the entirety of his now-empty house, dying in the dark. 

One year in the spring, back in high school, her mother had handed Ingrid a succulent for her desk that she would always forget to water but still never died. She knows it’s because whenever she was busy at school or practice or otherwise with her friends, her mother would make sure it would grow.

Ingrid wonders about it sometimes. Never seriously, never with too much thought—just a wandering, drifting curiosity that only comes when she misses home.

Three solid knocks on her door startle Ingrid out of her thoughts.

For a moment she considers ignoring it. She’s in the middle of a study session. Her first midterm is tomorrow and it’s worth almost twenty percent of her final grade but then she remembers that she’s an RA. Her duty requires her to rise to the call.

She jumps off her bed, messy and unmade, careful not to jostle the laptop that sits on top of one of her science texts, and yanks the door open.

Sylvain smiles at her from the hallway. His hand is propped up on the doorframe and she has to take a step back because he’s leaning forward a little, although he does not cross the threshold. He’s the most casual she’s seen him in a while, wearing a big green Garreg Mach hoodie and a too-nice pair of jeans.

“Sylvain?” She blinks, confused. “How’d you get in here?”

“Annette let me in,” he says before peering around her and frowning at her room. “You weren’t answering your phone.”

Ingrid digs into the pockets of her own giant hoodie for her phone. Sure enough, there are two missed calls and twelve separate texts from Sylvain. She frowns as she taps them to clear the messages. “Someone not answering usually means they’re busy, Sylvain.”

“You haven’t answered in a while,” he says. “So, I thought you could use a break.”

She sighs. “Physics is kicking my ass.”

“You’ve been studying all week for it. I bet you’re fine.” 

It’s true, she has, but no amount of preparation quells any of the buzzing in her chest. Dorothea had even come by earlier to help quiz her and while Ingrid had gotten most of the answers right, it doesn’t change the fact that she still feels like she knows nothing.

Sylvain peers over the top of her head and into the room. Ingrid feels, for the first time, suddenly quite shy about it. It’s a mess, which is unusual for her. She keeps her room immaculate most days but she’s just been so busy this week that she hasn’t had the time to pick anything up. At least there’s nothing on her floor except her backpack and strands of Dorothea’s leftover hair on her rug.

She shifts a little, taking a step forward again in hopes that she can block her room from sight with her body, but it doesn’t work. Sylvain has always been just tall enough that it never mattered and all she manages to accomplish is shifting a little too close to him. 

She hopes that Dorothea doesn’t catch them.

Sylvain doesn’t comment on the room. Instead, he glances back down at her, refusing to step back. The smile on his face is teasing as he lets his eyes drag over her person. “Is that my hoodie?”

Ingrid glances down at it, thankful to have something to look at other than this closeness between them. The front of her hoodie has a roaring blue lion on it, their high school mascot, but that means very little considering she has five of them, almost identical except for the names on the back. 

This one probably _is_ his though. It’s big but not too big like Dimitri’s. Felix’s fits closer to her own frame and Glenn’s is slightly too long, stretching towards her knees.

Her neck twists back, despite knowing she can’t see the blue cracked letters on the back.

“Maybe?” she says. “Although technically, it’s mine now. You gave it to me, didn’t you?”

Sylvain smiles and she tries to ignore the creeping flush on her neck. “I did,” he affirms.

She waits for him to say more but he doesn’t. Instead, he just stands at her doorway, a smile on his face, as if he has a secret that he doesn’t want to share but wants her to inquire about.

He’s more patient than she expects, more patient than she is ( _when did that happen?_ ), and eventually, although it really is no time at all, she crosses her arms.

“What did you want?” she asks, breaking first and finally taking that step back, just for a little more space between them but careful to ensure that it’s not enough space that he would be able to slip by her and into her room.

“Wondering if you’ve eaten yet.” Sylvain leans the other hand on her door frame, blocking her in entirely, which is funny considering what he says next, “and if you haven’t, then I was hoping you would like to get something with me.”

Ingrid bites her lip and then turns to glance at her notes on her bed with a frown. Her stomach grumbles.

“Alright,” she concedes, “but you’re buying.”

It’s only because she can’t remember the last time she ate, she tells herself. It has nothing to do with the fact that his smile doesn’t change when she looks back at him and sees him waiting.

* * *

The second the fresh air hits her lungs, the tension coiled up into Ingrid’s shoulders eases, and they drop the inch that she hadn’t been aware she’d been holding up as they meet the evening sky.

The horizon bursts bright orange, signaling the near-end of a beautiful day missed. When she looks up, she sees that the moon is out already, half-full against the still-blue section of the sky, a section rapidly darkening with every step she takes away from her dormitory.

She hadn’t realized how long she had been trapped inside her dorm room until Sylvain rescued her.

She used to make a point of studying outside of her room. On beautiful almost spring days like today, she would sprawl out on the grass in the quad, a book in her lap reflecting the too-bright shine of the natural light onto her eyes. 

Now she hides and misses the sun, catching only humming fluorescents in conference rooms and library carrels.

Still, even that is better than her dorm room. She at least likes the walk to and from buildings, likes the occasional catch of a familiar face as they walk by or stop to say hi, but exam weeks are brutal and every study room is booked up weeks in advance.

The dorm room is a poor substitute. Her bed is even worse. She hates it when the flashcards slide with the smallest of jostles and drop into the little crack between her bed and the wall. Just thinking of the hassle of reaching her hand down to avoid pulling out the bed entirely makes her sigh.

“Something wrong?” Sylvain asks beside her. The gap between them is small. Ingrid finds that she doesn’t mind.

When she glances at him, she sees the tiniest worried smile so she lifts her hand to rest lightly on the crook of his elbow and squeezes. “No,” she assures. “Just nice to get a little fresh air.”

“See,” he says, bumping into her. “Bet you wish you didn’t put me on mute.”

“Putting you on mute is the only reason I got enough done to even come out,” she says, dropping her hand back to her side.

Sylvain stops abruptly, so abruptly that he’s already a step or two behind before she notices. His eyebrows are furrowed deep, but he looks less worried and more perplexed than anything. “Were you just...not going to eat?”

She blinks, mirroring his confusion. “When did I say that?”

“I guess I was just-” he starts, but then he shakes his head. “Nevermind. Come on.”

Sylvain leads, half a step ahead of her. His head is held up high and that heavy weight she was once so used to seeing on his shoulders is not so much gone as it is better carried.

She wonders how she never noticed until now.

They continue in silence against the backdrop of an evening sky above the low quiet hum of city blocks that stretch onto forever. The air fills Ingrid better with Sylvain next to her. Her steps are slower with him, not like the brisk, too fast pace she usually keeps when she rushes to and from class. It reminds her of the silence with Felix in the morning that she cherishes and all those moments lying on the floor with Dorothea as they sink deeper and deeper into her ugly rug from the exhaustion that comes with the things they each shoulder.

It makes her miss Dimitri. Lately, it’s been harder to find him. She misses her friend’s quiet scribbles and how his lips mouth the words he reads as he sits next to her on the occasions they manage to steal a conference or library study room. It’s been a while since they’ve done that.

She misses a lot of things these days. 

* * *

Outside, on the busy street as cars whizz by, a smattering of what are likely to be students cluster together, chatting animatedly and looking cold with their hands stuffed into the pockets of their jackets, bouncing in place while they wait for their friends.

The shop Sylvain has taken her to is tiny. It’s some fake, little hole-in-the-wall-place that everyone seems to know anyway—hyped up by online reviews and campus proximity.

In the corner, mounted and hanging, is a small, old-school CRT television playing the evening news while people wait for takeaway. There are no tables, although there is a countertop protruding from one of the walls and three very old barstools pushed a little too close together.

Sylvain bounds up the line as Ingrid waits off to the side, where she can watch the dough knead on flour-dusted steel countertops through a little gap that peeks into the kitchen. Her eyes fixate on the fire roaring in the oven for a few beats before darting around as the everyday movements of a busy backroom of a tiny restaurant catches her attention. It feels familiar. It’s something that launches her all the way back, back to when she was a little girl climbing on top of the cardboard boxes behind the back of a little store.

Ingrid thinks of her father’s hands, reaching out for her to catch her before she falls. She remembers them as cracked and broken, raw beyond the routine callouses born from laboring hands. She remembers how the deep white lines in his palms stretched and stretched towards the tips of his fingers where the pads turn red from all those blisters, crisscrossing in lines that she was never able to follow. She used to trace her fingers on the lines with her tiny, smooth, child hands as he carried her. Her eyebrows furrowed deep in concentration with her lips pressed together as she tried to draw a single straight line from one end to the other and never being able to. The lines crossed in too many nonsensical ways and before long, her father would pull away, returning her to the ground to carry the weight of three sons and a daughter in other ways.

“Hey, Ingrid, you good?” 

Ingrid blinks. The beige, water-stained walls of a rapidly-darkening evening storefront returns to her from where she stands by the door. Sylvain’s face comes into focus, side-lit by the glow of buzzing yellow neon from a pizza sign illustration where the runny cheese spills into an almost cursive, flickering “PIZZ” because the “A” had long since died or perhaps had never ever been lit.

He’s smiling at her, a golden boy grin, holding out two of the biggest, oiliest slices he could find, seeping grease through the compostable paper plates.

“Yeah, Sylvain. I’m good.”

Lately, Sylvain seems to be the only one who can shake her out of the way her mind clings onto thoughts she doesn’t need. Lately, she seems to always want him around, even when she can’t afford to be distracted by how he drags her out of her dorm room, frazzled and biting on pens in his old high school hoodie, the night before her first midterm.

* * *

When they arrive at the park, Sylvain’s single slice of pizza is already finished and he has folded the paper plate in one hand. His other dangles at his side, brushing her sleeve. 

Ingrid uses her pizza plate as an excuse to ignore him. She holds it tightly in both hands, even when she only needs one to eat, and eats as slowly as she can until they come to a stop at a park table.

The evening has settled in completely now. The last bursts of the sun's rays have long since ducked behind the Goddess Tower, barely visible from the park. Ingrid’s eyes squint along the skyline as she looks for and finds that, tonight, the Tower does not remind her of the things to come tomorrow or the test she has to take. Instead, it reminds her of a story they used to tell. A lovers legend, one that she barely remembers.

She wonders, very briefly, why it comes now. 

Sylvain leans his hip against the table, his hand pressing flat against the surface to prop him up as Ingrid slides onto the bench diagonal from him, ignoring the way he watches her. Her plate is too oil-drenched for her to want to place it down on the table so she continues to hold it in her hand.

They are the only two people in the park. They had passed the last child on their way out with their mother, the child bouncing up excitedly as they prattled on about something imaginary.

Sylvain doesn’t say anything. He is instead content to appreciate the silence with her and she feels the sudden urge to lean her forehead against his arm, if only so she doesn’t have to keep staring at him. His profile is striking against the background of the oak tree and the glow of the nearby lamplight that’s kicked on automatically now that the sun is about to sleep. 

She wonders what he is thinking about. 

She almost hopes it's her.

* * *

At the bottom of a green plastic slide, Sylvain stretches out, comically huge as he lays. He must take up about half of the total height of the thing and his hair buzzes from the static of it.

“Remember when they used to make these out of metal?” he says, trying to pat his hair down and failing. “Those were so much better.”

“They also burned when you went down in the summer,” Ingrid says peering down at him over the edge of the slide. Her hands curl on the curve of the barrier that hopes to keep children from falling off next to where Sylvain just barely squeezes.

“Yeah but these shock.” He knocks the plastic with his knuckles. “How is that better?”

“The shock is less than a second Sylvain,” she says, rolling her eyes, “and it doesn’t happen that often.”

“Well, my hair disagrees.”

“You spend too much time on your hair anyway.”. 

“I spend the exact, correct amount of time on my hair.” He shifts in the slide, trying to find a comfortable position, but ends up rolling to lay halfway on his side, facing her. Her fingers curl deeper into the side of the slide, nails digging against the plastic. His face is so close to her hand that she can’t help but remember tracing his nose with her fingertips.

The urge to do it again catches in her chest and she holds it there for fear of reaching out and never wanting to let go. 

She wonders what he would do, wonders if his breath would be sharp, if he would lean into her or wrap his fingers around hers and hold them. Would it feel different than all the other touches they’ve shared over the years?

It scares her how much she wants this closeness with Sylvain. She wants soft touches in a playground slide reminiscing and joking about history and how things change. She wants it to feel like all those moments they used to have, chasing after him and Glenn and Samson, all a little older, hoping that they would see her. 

She thinks, when she looks at the way Sylvain is looking at her now, soft eyes and smile, breath on the back of her fingers, that maybe he wants it too. She does not know. She does not want to know, but that would be a very nice dream. 

* * *

The steel bleachers curl around a fenced and locked baseball field.

“Do you think we can climb it?” Sylvain asks, hands on his hips and staring upwards. He’s rolled his sleeves up as if he’s going to try.

They absolutely cannot climb it. The old semi-rusted chain-link fence stretches high above, to the point where she cannot properly see the top of it from where she stands in the dark on the ground below.

She throws him a look that he doesn’t catch because his back is to her and she watches the hair above his neck curl ever so slightly in a way that she has never noticed. 

It used to be shorter, she realizes. The kind of short that she imagines prickles when you run your hands through it. Now though, it might be soft.

He takes her silence for disapproval, which is exactly what she intends it to be. She does not have to verbally shoot down his stupid ideas for him to know where she stands. He knows her well enough even without looking at her.

He turns anyway and Ingrid rearranges her face to disapproving before he can catch her the kind of look she makes when she’s staring. He has a sheepish, boy-like grin, the kind that only comes from suggesting a bad idea. “You’re right,” he sighs, “but the grass on the outfield would be a great place to look at the stars.”

“There aren’t any stars out,” she says as she begins to wander, without thinking, towards the bleachers. 

“There are always stars out,” he replies, following.

She climbs up onto the steel seats. Her heavy footsteps clank against the bleachers and she listens to the once-familiar clangs from the impact of her shoes on sheet metal. 

Sylvain follows her from the row beneath, hands shoved deep in his pockets. He does not seem so tall this way.

“Yeah, but we can’t see them,” she says as she continues to ascend. Her eyes stay on the bleachers. In the dark, it is almost dangerous to climb, but the spaces are even and it is not hard to climb upwards. “Not like in Fhirdiad.” 

“You can’t think of another reason to lie in the grass with me?” His voice is amused, playful, and much further than the three rows that separate them. “Who knew you were so into astronomy.” 

“I’m not,” she frowns, thinking of physics again. “Or, well, I don’t dislike it, but who doesn’t like stars?”

Sylvain’s hum of acknowledgment carries all the way to her ears. She decides, for no reason at all, that this is the best place to sit. 

Ingrid’s on the second-highest row of the bleachers, towards the center, staring down at a field she can barely see. They are terrible seats. They are the seats where people sit when they have no interest in the game itself. 

She tucks her chin onto one of her hands, leaning against an elbow, and stares towards where Sylvain now approaches.

“Do you miss them?” he asks.

She scoots automatically over to make room for him even though they are the only two people in the park.

“The stars?” she says as he settles beside her, close enough that the sleeves of their hoodies brush. Garreg Mach is nowhere as cold as Fhirdiad but still, Ingrid shivers.

Sylvain shrugs. “Sure.”

“I mean I guess?” she says, scooting a little away from him. “I never thought about it really until now.”

Sylvain turns to her, swinging his leg over to straddle the bleacher to face her fully. “How about Fhirdiad?”

“Of course I miss Fhirdiad. My whole family is there. Well, except Sam, I guess. How about you? Do you miss it?”

Sylvain frowns. She doesn’t know why she’s asked when she already knows the answer. “Not really,” he says. “Not anymore.”

“What changed?”

Sylvain grins. “You guys caught up.”

“Did we?” she whispers. She doesn’t mean to say that out loud.

Sylvain blinks at her and Ingrid can’t help but clutch hard around the cool edges of the bleachers where she lets the metal dig into her palms. She can’t look at him anymore, not when he looks at her with such gentle befuddlement, confused at her challenge.

Sylvain is centered. His truth is clear. She wonders when they switched places.

Ingrid leans back to peer into a near-starless sky. At least she still has the moon. 

“What do you mean?” he asks.

Ingrid hums. “You graduate this semester.” 

If he frowns, Ingrid does not catch it but she is almost certain she feels it. 

“Yeah but this is different,” he explains. “I’m not going anywhere this time. I’ll stick around for another year with the internship before transferring to my father’s company.”

“Why wait a year?” 

There’s a pause before he speaks. “You don’t want me around?”

Sylvain tries to sound playful but she knows him well enough to hear the old, hard-armored shell he will never truly shed. When she turns to look at him again, she meets his soft, worried smile.

Her hand reaches over to his forearm. “It’s not that,” she reassures before pulling away. Ingrid can’t let herself linger. “It’s just—why wait when you can start your career earlier?”

“I’m not exactly in a hurry, Ingrid,” Sylvain says. His voice is quiet, honest. His eyes are too. “I don’t mind waiting.”

“What about your father?”

“What about him?”

Ingrid presses her lips together, unsure how to ask questions with answers Sylvain might not want to give. 

But he gives them anyway. 

“He’s not in a hurry either,” he tells her. “I’m not sure he wants me to work with him so much as he wants me to work _for_ him.”

“But you never wanted to do that.”

He shrugs. “Not really no. I don’t exactly have a passion for business.”

“I’m not sure anyone has a passion for business,” Ingrid jokes, thinking of Dorothea. 

Sylvain smiles at her. “I don’t really know what I want to do. I never have. Just a lot of things I don’t want to do but I figure I’ve got some time to figure it out and while I figure it out, I might as well do it here—with you.”

Ingrid ducks her head and looks down at her shoes, trying not to frown where Sylvain can see. 

There’s something about his tone, about the way he had said ‘with you,’ that travels from his lips directly into her chest and then all the way down her spine. Ingrid knows he does it on purpose.

She’s not stupid. She cannot pretend away all these little quiet moments just between the two of them. It is not casual flirting anymore. It has not been casual flirting in a very long time. It is honest conversations that make the whole world fall quiet and her worries suspend. 

If Ingrid didn’t know him as well as she does, if she hasn’t known him forever, she might be able to convince herself that it means nothing. He is certainly clever enough to leave room for her to hide behind nothing.

But it’s not nothing.

She does not need Dorothea’s pointed looks or Sylvain’s disguised words to know. 

It’s not nothing but it is also too much. Because, alongside this _almost_ between them, without either of them noticing, Sylvain has jumped three steps ahead of her. He’s a little older, sure, but Ingrid had always felt like he was walking right beside her anyway. Hell, sometimes walking behind her, given how much he had relied on her.

But, now, when she looks at him, she feels like she is falling behind on a sprint track. They both burst through the gate at the same time when the gun fired, but she is losing, watching him pull forward with each and every step, desperate to catch up even as her heart aches and lungs burn. Sylvain’s next step is clear. It is somewhere high above in the skies, tucked away in lavish corporate office buildings too many stories up, in a world where you can no longer see the people below, scuttling about the streets.

Meanwhile, her future is a jumbled mess. What was once a straight line has slowly curled and furled and tangled into a mess she cannot even start to unravel. She can’t see it anymore. It feels like a blurry polaroid someone snatched from the camera too quickly for it to ever properly develop. 

The gap between them has never felt larger. 

“With me, huh?” she says quietly, slowly, her mouth lingering over each and every word as they leave her, almost on their own volition.

She swears Sylvain’s eyes shine. “You’re not getting rid of me that easily.”

Ingrid has heard that before, only for people to wander far and away from her anyway, jumping onto different tracks, living different lives where they only sometimes intersect. She has been here with a few of her high school friends, only catching snippets of their lives on Crestagram. She has done that with the teammates that she used to sweat with, bleed with. Teammates whom she captained and led. 

She has done that with Glenn. 

And this is like Glenn, isn’t it? This _almost_ thing that she has with Sylvain. This thing she does not want to pursue because she _can’t_. Ingrid absolutely can’t. But then Sylvain looks at her, smiling— _always smiling_ —with soft, honey brown eyes and the corner of his lips curled _just so_ as he reaches out to tuck her hair behind her ear. And it is _such_ a move. It is an offering for an opening that is more than friendly but still casual enough to dismiss. It makes him seem so close, even as he pulls and pulls ahead of her. 

It would be so, so easy to reach out, to place her hand against his cheek and lean into him wholly. 

Sylvain would let her. 

* * *

The almost-spring night is warm against her skin. Ingrid sighs into the chain of the swing she’s sitting on as Sylvain stands one foot on his, rocking back and forth on the bright blue, plastic seat. 

He used to do this all the time as a kid and she used to warn him that he’d break his arm. It never deterred him. Even when he actually did.

“Remember when they used to use tanbark?” he shouts out into the evening air. The echo across the playground carries all the way down to the quiet street as Sylvain tries to soar up into the branches of the giant ancient oak tree hanging over the swingset.

Ingrid looks down at the ground, eying the blue rubber playground mulch that her shoes are barely toeing and grimaces. “Remember when they used to use _concrete?_ ”

“Goddess,” he says, and she can just imagine the way his nose wrinkles, “honestly, the rubber doesn’t look all that safe either.”

“Would probably still hurt if you hit the ground, yeah,” she says as he gets higher and higher. 

“Miracle we didn’t die.”

“Miracle you don’t die if you’re going to do what I think you’re going to do.”

The swing clangs hard against the metal as Sylvain leaps. She watches as he soars for a moment, lit by the warm glow of nearby lamplight. From her angle on the ground, he seems so high, high enough that it almost looks like he has a chance at reaching out and grasping onto the closest branch even though she knows that the nearest one is at least another five feet above him. In the air like this, Sylvain looks like he could reach anything. Ingrid almost believes that he can.

He lands with a thud on his feet. His back to her before he spins on his heel, arms spread open with only the barest of winces and the best grin he can manage.

Ingrid gives him a little clap and he bows before jogging up in front of her, just out of the range of her legs as she barely swings. 

“How’re your feet?” she asks.

Sylvain lifts one of his feet towards him to brush off his shoes, tapping at the sides. “Still there,” he says. “But, yeah, _ow_.” His lips turn downward into a theatrical looking grimace. “Do not recommend. My ankles did not like that.”

Ingrid snorts. “Okay, old man.”

“It’s the rubber, I swear,” he says, dropping his foot back onto the ground now that he’s done inspecting his shoe. “I preferred the tanbark. Remind me to put my kid in a bubble. A bubble of tanbark.”

“That sounds horribly unpleasant,” she says and before she can stop herself she asks, “you want kids?”

Sylvain shrugs. It’s too casual. As if he’s feigning it. “I mean, not right now, no, but yeah, someday maybe? You?”

The stirring in her chest becomes uncomfortable when her mind forms the image of a Sylvain Jose Gautier with kids. 

Ingrid’s hands tighten around the chains of her swing. “I don’t even know what I’m going to do next year, let alone the next ten.”

Sylvain’s eyebrows furrow deeply. “What happened to the ten-year plan?” 

Ingrid slows the swing to a stop. “It changed.”

“No more med school?”

She shakes her head before leaning her cheek onto the cold metal chain on one side, both hands curling right underneath her chin. She lets her feet dangle barely an inch above the mulch and feels the slowest movement from the seat as it lulls her into a gentle rock.

“Why?” he asks.

“It’s expensive,” she admits out loud for the first time. “And my parents still have two more kids to put through school. I can’t do that to them.”

He frowns and shifts. Sylvain’s hands disappear into his pockets. She can’t blame him for being uncomfortable. Everyone always is. “But you worked so hard.”

“I’m still working hard,” she says. “Although I’m not really sure why. Too late to stop, I guess.”

“So what are you going to do instead?”

“I don’t know,” she says, lifting her feet up and stretching her legs out towards him. They don’t quite reach. “I need to figure it out but I just don’t have the time to and at the same time, I feel like I’m running out of it.”

He moves around her, stepping behind her swing, and holds both of the chains in his hands. Her seat jolts as he does so but then he slows her to a dead stop.

He’s close enough that if she straightens up and leans back just a little, she would press up against his body. It takes an annoying amount of effort not to.

“You still have time.” She hears behind her. 

He holds her there for a second. Ingrid drops her feet back to the ground where her shoes scrape against the rubber. “Not really.”

“You’re burnt out Ingrid,” he says, sounding exasperated. His left hands retreats, she imagines he is rubbing his neck with it. “Once you take some time to yourself, you’ll be able to figure out what to do next.”

“Maybe.”

The angle is uncomfortable so Ingrid stands up and turns, leaving the swing between them. Her hands reach out and find their place just under his as they curl around the chain-link, barely an inch below Sylvain’s.

“No maybe, Ingrid,” he insists, jostling the swing a bit. His hand returns. They both hold the swing between them like a barrier. “Think about it. You've been in school your entire life. What did you think was going to happen?”

“Not everyone gets to take a year off to backpack across the continent you know,” she hums with a small smile.

Sylvain frowns. It’s a little thing but it’s there as he considers her words. “That’s true,” he says with a shrug. “But not everyone has to take summer sessions every year.”

Ingrid sighs. “It was supposed to help me graduate a semester early.”

“And how’s that working out for you?”

She frowns too and looks down at her shoes. 

“I thought so,” Sylvain says when she doesn’t answer. 

Maybe it would be nice to have a little extra time to figure out what to do. She would kill for some extra time now.

“School is all I know,” she admits. Then, quieter than before, she adds, “I thought I’d have more time to figure things out.”

“You’re stressed,” Sylvain says with the kind of slowness that comes from a late night in a place that makes it feel like you’re the only two people in the world. “You have been for a while.”

“I know.” Her eyes meet his again. “But everyone is always stressed. We’re students. It happens.”

“Not like you.” The gentle worry in his expression almost takes her breath away. “You’ve got a lot on your plate.”

“We all have things on our plate.”

He chews his lips. She can see his frustration begin to seep through with the way his breath comes, slightly faster. She knows she’s being purposefully obtuse but she’s also honest. She always is. 

“Ingrid.” The way he says her name is curt and clipped. 

She ducks her head a little, just for a moment. “Sorry.” 

When she glances back up, she just catches the shake of his head and watches as his hair floats back into place. “No,” he says quietly, “I’m sorry.”

“Sylvain.”

She doesn’t know what she means by the way she says his name. She does not know if it is a warning or if it is a yearning. Perhaps it is both. 

“Something is going to give.” The look in his eye, sad and worried for her, tells her everything she already knows. Everything she has known for a while now but has refused to put into words. “Eventually.”

Somehow, without noticing, the space between them has shrunk. Her thighs dig into the blue seat of the plastic swing with Sylvain just on the other side. He tilts forward, just a bit, over the seat itself, closer to her, and it’s so minute and little that she wonders if he knows he is doing it at all—if he knows what he does to her. 

Then she decides that he must because there can be no hiding how her breath catches when the side of his palm grazes over the top of where her index finger curls around the chain with the barest of brushes. 

The chainlink of the swing is warm now from how long their palms have held onto it, but for Ingrid, the warmth she feels is all from him— _his closeness and his smile and the tone of his voice when he worries for her._ That warmth feels like something that could stretch, far and wide, encompassing the giant oak tree beside them and digging deep into the roots underneath the dirt, past the concrete weaving throughout the park and beyond. 

It feels like a burst of warm sunlight on a cold, dark night. 

Her eyes glance over him. She has to look up to see him. Sylvain is tall and close enough that she can see the cracks in his lips and the little divots of his cheekbones. Close enough that all she needs to do is reach a little, lean a little, in order to kiss him. He is waiting for it. She knows because she has been waiting for it too.

“Something already has.” Ingrid’s voice is a sad soft song. Something in her throat catches with the way the words leave her. Something else is in her eyes, prickling. The world slows and the night goes still. The lamplight nearby does not flicker. She is sure, in this second, that there is no time at all. It is just her watching Sylvain.

The small smile he had been wearing nearly all night—her favorite—turns. It flips downward once again, but this time he does not shake it off. This time, it stays. 

She can see herself in him, knows that she is mirrored. Her hands slide down away from the chain and retract back into the too-large-for-her sleeves of Sylvain’s high school hoodie but she refuses to look away.

“Oh,” he says when he realizes. “It’s me, isn’t it?”

The look in his eyes breaks her entire heart because she knows what she’s doing to him. She knows that he has been slowly but surely charming her.

He has never bothered to hide it. If she had asked, Ingrid is sure he would have told her. He had just chosen to hold his tongue as if he could sense that she had not been ready for it. He wouldn’t have lied to her about it. Sylvain is almost always honest with her.

This is Sylvain and her and this is the truth she hasn’t been brave enough to voice or perhaps, it is less about bravery and more because she knew that putting a name to it would end it. 

It is unfair to him, she knows. She wants to have him and not have him. It is selfish. He had not minded it. 

But now he has said it. He has manifested this nebulous _almost_ into reality or as close to reality as he can without saying it directly and now she cannot pretend it away to nothing. It is real now. It would be unfair to leave him in limbo any further from this point.

Something has to give because Ingrid can’t hold everything in her hands. It’s too much. Sylvain is too much. The easiest thing to let go of is right in front of her, on the other side of the swing, still holding onto the chains with his hands.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers and it is so quiet because it is so final and she doesn’t want it to be final. It is rational to let Sylvain go. She cannot handle a relationship right now.

She doesn’t want to be rational. Not truly.

The easy part comes with the way Sylvain says—“It’s okay, Ingrid”—with his entire heart in her hands.

He will always forgive her. She knows that but she had never wanted to hurt him. It’s one of the many reasons why she has held off for so long.

Sylvain finally steps around the swing as he comes to stand in front of her. She can’t look at him anymore without feeling like she wants to cry and she doesn’t want to cry because that will only make things harder.

Ingrid used to be brave. She wonders when she lost that too.

Sylvain steps closer. His shoes almost toe hers. She can feel the warmth from him even with the space between them and it is way too close and yet no part of her wants to step away because—

“It’s okay,” he says again. His hand reaches out. She watches it, watches him hesitate and hover around hers. “I can wait.”

Ingrid shakes her head. She swallows. The words are thick in her throat; they catch halfway through and struggle for a way free. She may no longer be brave, but she is still thorough. “I don’t want you to.”

It is not a lie but it is not a whole truth because the whole truth is that a very strong part of her wants him to wait. Ingrid wants him to wait forever. She wants Sylvain to love her enough that he will be on the other side but, the other part of her, the one that isn’t selfish—the other part that cares for him and cares for him more deeply than she ever thought possible—is able to say, “You _can’t_ Sylvain.”

“I want to though,” Sylvain says. He presses his head against hers. She feels the way he breathes, slowly and deeply, as if he is breathing her in for the very first and very last time. “More than anything.”

He nudges, just a little bit, just enough to coax her gaze up, in order to see his eyes shut. Sylvain is so, _so_ close: close enough that she can see and count every eyelash, closer than they have ever been. His breath is hot near her lips and Ingrid holds her breath as he holds her hands. 

“Don’t,” she pleads. “ _Please_.”

He breathes in a deep, slow, heavy breath again. “Okay,” he promises as his nose grazes the side of hers. “But I want to.”

She can’t help it. Her fingers squeeze his. “I do too,” she confesses quietly. “But you can’t.”

Because there will be no going back from this if he kisses her. Because if he kisses her, Ingrid will let herself love him and no one else. She will fall into him and lose herself and the only thing she feels like she has these days is herself and even that slips further and further away with each and every day.

She can’t lose herself to him. Not when there is so much at stake. Not when her parents’ sacrifices whisper in her ear.

Sylvain is, as always, merciful. He lifts his forehead off of hers and she feels—forevermore, she thinks—the ghost of his breath. 

If just even this closeness is enough to almost break her—

“Thank you,” she says. 

Sylvain nods. It gives her the courage to drop his hand, to pull hers back into the pocket of the hoodie she wears with his name on it. 

They don’t talk after that. He walks her home silently, his heart shoved back into the hands he sinks deep in his own pockets. She is guided towards the Goddess Tower by only the slow steadying beats of her heart in the starless, moonlit night.

She can’t promise Sylvain something she cannot give. Ingrid wants him to have the entire world and she knows she isn’t it. 

She wants him to be her world but there are so many other things she’s holding—important things with important people—so she can’t. But she wants it. More than anything. 

Because the single simple truth is this:

Ingrid is in love with him.

She just doesn’t have anything left to give.


	4. there's a lot of days without you.

* * *

The flurry of exams ends quicker than the impending, crawling dread that comes with waiting for them. They are taken in a haze-induced week-and-a-half-rush that Ingrid barely comes out the other side of.

Now, there is nothing left to do but wait.

And with waiting comes wanting. 

Ingrid does her best to ignore it. She busies herself with other thoughts and other friends. She focuses on taking notes she’s not entirely sure she needs, checking on lab partners and all the things she still (always) needs to do but her heart just isn’t in it. Instead, her heart is wrapped up in the low glow of lamplight and that squeaky old swing. 

That evening lingers on her skin, makes her shiver like it’s cold and bury herself deeper into the sleeves of a hoodie with her own name etched onto its back. 

That night hurts and hurts and never goes away.

She keeps thinking about him.

Ingrid didn’t think it’d be like this. It’s not like she and Sylvain have always been attached at the hip. They had been in different years in school and they’ve gone without speaking for long periods of time before and she has always been fine.

But before feels like a long time ago. Ingrid is not the same girl in high school who used to play about lacrosse, power through school, and wonder about Glenn.

She thought that this would be like Glenn.

That night in the park when Sylvain almost kissed her, feels like losing something more than that almost. It feels like she has lost something she’s not sure she will ever get back.

It’s different now. She and Sylvain are different. They cannot go back to the ease of being friends without this thing between them. She can’t unknow how her heart wants him. She can’t forget the way he had looked at her when she had finally stepped away.

The reason she let herself be pulled along for this long is simple. She wanted it. Ingrid wanted to bask in all the time she had with him, but she had known— _she has always known_ —that it couldn’t last.

She was always going to step away.

If she had been smarter or less human, perhaps she would have never fallen in the first place. She would have stopped the second she had realized what Sylvain was starting to mean to her. She would have saved them both the trouble and built a too-tall, rusty baseball field fence that Sylvain could not hop over.

But Ingrid let him in. She knows why. 

Because, deeply, in a place that she has a hard time admitting exists, Ingrid wants food truck adventures in parking lots, phone calls late at night where he whispers into her ear, and for him to steal sips off of her morning coffee. She wants greasy pizza storefronts that probably need another health-code check and a green park slide he doesn’t fit in but tries to anyway. 

Sylvain reminds her to breathe.

When she is with him, she doesn’t think about school or stress. He drags her out of thoughts of her father’s worn, weathered scars on his hands. She thinks, instead, of the way Sylvain makes her laugh and the time he steals away from her.

But after each escape, after each phone call, Ingrid always ends up in her dorm room alone where her eyes glaze over endless notes as she hides from voicemails and digs through her constantly pinging email inbox. Afterwards, she is left only with the deep, sinking guilt of a plant she forgets to water.

Until he comes around again and it starts all over again.

Ingrid needs to figure out how to do this without him. 

And Sylvain is lovely enough, kind enough—though he would never admit it **—** to let her. 

Her phone doesn’t vibrate with his messages. His goofy contact photo doesn’t pop up. She keeps the Faerghus Four chat on mute and does her damndest to keep her head down and mind focused.

It doesn’t work. She hadn’t expected it not to work. She hadn’t expected that being away from him would only make her yearn for him more. 

Because it hadn’t hurt like this when Glenn left.

Glenn had always been close but far enough away that she was used to the distance and then, when it got wider, Ingrid hadn’t even noticed.

Sylvain’s abrupt departure from her world yanks away pieces of her. It stings. If she had known, she would have eased out if it slowly, step by step, so that it would hurt a little less than it does now. Hindsight is funny that way.

She tries her best to distract herself with the things that are directly in front of her. She focuses on school and nothing else, but it doesn’t work.

Because her first round of midterms are over. Because she takes a breath and has no one to take it with. Because now she is staring at the white wall, waiting in-between the week and a half break until her next test, until her next project, and it’s just her in her empty dorm room.

Ingrid wants to love him.

* * *

* * *

* * *

* * *

* * *

Dimitri finds her at some random cafeteria table she’s parked herself at. It feels like she hasn’t seen him in forever. The last time they had met up was one near-silent conference room session as they worked on different things in the same room right before crunch week sped on at full throttle. The only time they chatted that night was to ask whose turn it was to stand up so that the motion lights would turn back on again. 

“This seat taken?” he asks, ever polite.

Ingrid’s frazzled, bent-over body coils upwards from her unintentionally hunched-over position. She had been leaning way too closely into the index cards she’s studying on the table and she slowly blinks at the gentle handsome smile of a man she’s known her whole life. “There’s always a seat for you,” she welcomes with a tired smile.

Dimitri slides into the gestured-to seat across from her. He’s got two cups in his hand and before she can ask, he places one on her side of the table. “I took the liberty of getting you a refill. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Thank you,” she says. She peers at the tag of the teabag: chamomile. Her favorite. 

The sip she takes warms her entire body. For a moment she just lets herself enjoy it and registers just how miserable she really feels. Dimitri’s worried gaze tells her that he notices this too.

She is having a hard time hiding it these days. She had been much better at it in high school. 

_You’re burnt out Ingrid._

“You’ve been quiet lately,” Dimitri says.

She knows this is his way of politely asking if she is okay. “I muted the chat,” she admits. She doesn’t tell Dimitri how close she had come to leaving it altogether. “I usually manage to check it before bed but lately I’ve just been going straight to sleep.”

It’s only half a lie, which feels strange when directed towards Dimitri. She hardly ever lies to Dimitri. She’s never really had a reason to. She’s not entirely sure why she’s lying to him now.

Shame, maybe. Regret, more likely.

He eyes her curiously. “Have you?”

She sighs. It is again, this tired conversation. She wonders why it’s always about how little sleep she has. Ingrid sleeps just fine, just enough, and yes, she’s exhausted but it’s not from lack of sleep. It’s from everything else in her life. There are quite a lot of things in her life, after all.

She frowns as an intrusive thought reminds her that she has one less thing to worry about now. 

“I sleep fine,” she says instead, tapping the tip of her pen against one of her index cards. 

Dimitri accepts it. “Alright. But we’ve been worried about you. Sylvain asks, you know.”

Ingrid tenses at the mention of his name. She hasn’t seen or heard from him in a week, outside of the group chat she tries really hard not to look at.

When she doesn’t respond, Dimitri continues. “I was wondering why he was asking me when he could ask you himself. The only conclusion I could arrive at is that something must have happened that prevents him from doing so.”

“Very astute, Dimitri,” Ingrid sighs. “Yes, something happened. I don’t really want to talk about it.”

He accepts this too. “I understand,” Dimitri says kindly. “But, he’s not the only person asking after you.”

Her brow knits. “Who else?”

“Me,” he says, sounding sad, but he has a little smile on his face that isn’t entirely out of place. “I hardly ever see you anymore. I care about you a great deal, you know.”

Something about his words strikes her. She’s not sure if it’s because of how stressed she is, the lack of contact, the fact that it’s Dimitri saying it, or all three, but she feels like crying. 

To his credit, Dimitri is not alarmed by it. “Ingrid,” he says softly. His mouth opens to say more.

“Dimitri,” she interrupts quickly, “I know. You don’t have to say anything because if you do, I’m probably going to start crying in the cafeteria and I really don’t want to do that.”

Dimitri frowns. “Would you rather cry somewhere else?”

“I would rather not cry at all,” she says. “Especially not in front of you.”

He looks perplexed. “Me? Why?”

Ingrid blinks rapidly, hoping to ward off the tears threatening to fall, and swallows roughly to soothe the frog in her throat. “I don’t want to cry in front of anyone.”

But there’s something about her relationship with Dimitri in particular that makes her feel that way. Maybe it’s because she feels a little bit like a big sister to him. Maybe it’s because she remembers the mess he’d been when he lost his parents. It had taken him months to get into another car. He’d just been so incredibly angry; he needed people there to hold him up and coax him back. 

Maybe she never shook that need to protect him. It’s kind of unfair of her now that she thinks about it.

“It’s okay to cry Ingrid,” Dimitri tells her seriously. “It took me a while and an incredible amount of therapy to accept, but it’s not a weakness. It’s okay to cry.” 

Ingrid’s eyes snap to his. Dimitri’s open, blue eyes don’t waver. “I just feel like I’m always on the verge of tears these days.” And she’s a little afraid that if she starts crying, she’ll never stop.

Dimitri shifts in his seat, concern written all over her face. “Because of Sylvain?”

“No.” She lets out a deep exhale. Her hand pinches at the bridge of her nose. “Or, well, that’s more of a recent development. For a while, he was one of the only things that kept me sane.”

Dimitri doesn’t say anything. He waits instead, silently encouraging her along with a nod. 

“I’m very stressed,” she admits, “so I think it’s a lot of trying to deal with that.”

Dimitri hums. “There always seems to be something doesn’t there?”

“It never ends.” 

Dimitri leans forward, setting his elbows on the table in front of them, careful not to jostle her textbook or index cards. “Ingrid,” he says, firm but soft somehow. “If I may. I know it’s not my place to say, but there’s something I think you ought to consider.”

Ingrid gestures to let him continue. 

“You said that Sylvain was one of the few things keeping you sane. Did you consider that not having him around would affect how you’re handling your stress?”

Ingrid blinks at Dimitri a few times. “Oh.”

“Just something to think about.”

* * *

The biggest problem with how Dimitri’s words roll around her head is that Ingrid doesn’t want Sylvain to keep her sane. She doesn’t want anyone to keep her sane. She does not want to rely on another person to hold her together, not when she’s supposed to be able to do that on her own. 

It’s dangerous to let Sylvain carry that much of her heart.

What if he breaks it?

And he could break it. He has broken so many over the years. Ingrid has watched him do it. She has helped clean up the shattered hearts of girls left in his wake. She doesn’t want to be one of them. 

It seems silly to think about now though. It’s a little belated, admittedly, but Ingrid has spent so much time not thinking about it, full-on refusing to think about Sylvain and her heart, that when she does, it hits her all at once.

These old fears and ancient questions that should have been answered and dealt with a lifetime ago cascade onto her shoulders, collapsing into her heart.

It is more than just the matter of time, really. It’s too many things to sort out. It is easier to do this without him.

At least, that’s what she keeps telling herself.

* * *

* * *

The lounge in the Student Center is near empty this afternoon. The first few days after exams and spring creeping steadily in tends to push everyone out and back into the world, desperate for much-needed sunlight.

Ingrid does not mind it. It means she gets to sit on what is the most comfortable couch she has ever sat on perhaps ever, although the one in Felix’s childhood basement comes close.

Dorothea plops onto the lounge seat across from her. The electric fireplace beside them roars despite the approaching season.

“Hello, Dorothea,” Ingrid greets, barely looking up from the lecture notes on her laptop. She has a few she’s going over but nothing pressing, well, other than yet another one of those endless modules she still has to do. Exams may be over but the assignments never seem to stop. “And how are you today?”

“Exhausted,” Dorothea says like she’d been waiting for Ingrid to ask, fanning herself with one hand. 

Dorothea has no blazer today, nor does she have on any of her usual business professional attire. Instead, her hair is wet and tied up—something she will likely regret later and complain to Ingrid about—and she’s wearing the Garreg Mach hoodie she had won from a raffle freshman year with matching sweatpants that Ingrid is sure are actually hers. She can tell because they’re slightly too short for Dorothea’s long, slender legs.

“ _Your_ exams may be over,” Dorothea sighs, “but I have two presentations due and the world’s worst project partners.”

“Aren’t you in HR?” Ingrid says. “You’d think you guys would know how to interact with each other better.”

“You would think!” Dorothea bemoans. “But, no. Pretentious and condescending without a single _ounce_ of politeness. You can tell neither of them have ever worked a retail job before in their lives. _Fuck you,_ _Ferdinand Von Aegir._ ”

Ingrid can’t help but smile. She sympathizes but Dorothea’s flair for the dramatic will probably always be at least a little amusing. “Wow, you even know his full name.”

Dorothea throws her hands in the air. “He won’t let me forget it!”

Ingrid winces. “That bad huh?” 

“The worst I’ve ever had and together with _Lorenz_? Goddess, they’re both insufferable.” Dorothea leans forward to rest her elbows on her knees and rub her temples. “Why oh why couldn’t we have been in the same program?”

“Probably because I have no interest whatsoever in business.” 

“Well, it’s not like I have a great love for it either.” Dorothea drops one hand away from her temple and shifts so that she can lean her chin against the palm of the hand still propped up on her knee. “But I’m good at it and I can do it. That’s really what matters, I guess.”

Ingrid’s hands still over her keyboard, hovering above the keys. Her eyebrows knit together as she stares at Dorothea, considering. 

Dorothea blinks up curiously. “Something on my face?”

Ingrid shakes her head quickly. “No, not that. Just...You know what? Nevermind.” 

Dorothea raises an eyebrow and stares. It doesn’t take long for Ingrid to break. 

“Why business?” Ingrid’s words come out rushed, too quick as they leave her. She adjusts, and takes a breath, trying to sound casual again. “You know, since you don’t love it.”

She must have asked this question before but Ingrid cannot, for the life of her, remember Dorothea’s answer.

Dorothea sighs and leans back into her chair. “Because I’d like to have a career that I can see.” 

“And you can’t see a career anywhere else?”

“I can’t see a career I’d like to do anywhere else. Sciences were never my forte. I’m good at math but the thought of just doing that every day for the rest of life sounds absolutely miserable. Goddess, imagine if I was an accountant!” Dorothea makes a face and shakes her head once so vigorously that a strand of hair falls out of her ponytail and into her face. “I enjoy literature; I used to read a lot of plays, but there’s not really a pathway for me there. I like people. HR feels right and at least I can make things better for them that way. Everything else is just not nearly as interesting.”

Ingrid fixates on one thing: the amusing factoid she has never known about her friend. “You like plays?” she asks.

“I was a drama kid, Ingrid.” Dorothea smiles. “I thought you knew that.”

“Well, I did, but I didn’t realize you studied it extensively.”

“Most of my literature classes were on plays,” Dorothea explains. “I went to a very nice performing arts high school but as much as I love the theatre, it’s mostly music that drew me.”

That, Ingrid did know. It’s no secret that Dorothea loves music. The girl still somehow manages to fit choir practice into her very busy life. “So why not go to a conservatory?”

Dorothea’s nose wrinkles just a bit before falling into her usual expression of exhausted, overdramatic defeat as she sinks deeper back into the chair, tucking her feet onto the chair. “Music conservatories are expensive, dear,” she says, fanning herself with her hand. “And highly competitive.”

“So you decided on Garreg Mach?”

“Not at first.” Dorothea looks down at her hands, a small frown fixed in place as she reflects. “I got into a conservatory in Enbarr, actually. Like I said, they’re expensive.”

Ingrid presses her lips to a thin line. She thinks of all the lacrosse scholarships she never got and the acceptances she declined because the ones she did get weren’t enough. “I’m sorry, Dorothea." 

She doesn’t know what else to say.

Dorothea shakes her head and whatever she’d been thinking about seems to shake off with her. She sits up straight. “Don’t be,” she says lightly. “I actually could go. My godmother and I scrounged around and, with a massive amount of loans, some scholarships, and a part-time job, I probably could have gone. I was the one who decided not to.”

“And why’s that?”

“Because it’d be more difficult than it’s worth.” Dorothea pauses for a second before continuing, her voice much lower and softer, as if she’s speaking to herself, “And I want to be able to repay Manuela for all the things she did for me growing up. She’s never asked for it but...what I want to do with music isn’t what I want to do with my life. Not right now at least. Right now, this is more important to me; this is what’s realistic for me. Maybe that’ll change one day, I’m not sure.”

There’s not much Ingrid can say to this, other than: “I get that.”

Because she does. Because Ingrid knows what it’s like to feel the need to be grateful and stable. Because she knows the harsh limitations of reality when it comes to dreams.

She wonders what she used to dream of, what kind of person she always hoped she would be. It’s probably someone that can do right by her family. It’s probably still that.

“So what about you?” Dorothea asks.

“What do you mean?”

“What great love did you lose?” 

Ingrid freezes for a moment before her wide eyes meet Dorothea’s careful gaze. “What?”

It comes out a little more breathless than Ingrid meant it to. 

“Music was mine,” Dorothea says breezily. “What was your great love? Sports?”

Ingrid bites so hard down on her lip that she thinks she might draw blood. “It was literature, actually.”

Dorothea raises an eyebrow. “Unexpected.” 

Ingrid tucks a stray strand of hair behind her ear, leaning forward over her laptop keyboard and squinting at the screen while she minimizes the documents, trying to appear casual. “I used to read a lot,” she says. “Mostly medieval lit. I was obsessed with Loog and Kyphon.”

“I had no idea,” Dorothea says with a fond looking smile. Ingrid bristles under it. It feels strange to admit it out loud even when there is nothing to be ashamed about. There is no embarrassment with literature. It’s a tame and perfectly acceptable hobby. “Why not pursue it?”

Ingrid had considered it actually, a long time ago. At one point, when she had been much more ambitious or perhaps just stilled starry-eyed by the draw of post-secondary education, she’d considered doing both sciences and literature at the same time. It was a doomed venture, destined to fail the second she stepped into her first-year chemistry lecture and realized the amount of work it would be.

She hasn’t thought about that in a very long time. Back then, Samson had still been struggling and her father’s warning was still fresh in her ear. _Be realistic_.

“What was it you said?” Ingrid says, mustering up a smile. “There’s not a pathway for you there?”

“I was talking about plays dear,” Dorothea says shifting in her chair to cross a leg over a knee. “Specifically Cichol’s. There’s only so much you can do with Cicholian plays in the realm of literature.”

“I feel like several people in the literature department would disagree with you there.”

“Okay, let me rephrase then. There’s only so much _I_ can do with Cicholian plays. I can’t imagine wanting to read and study the same sets of plays over and over again for the rest of my life. I just don’t have the patience.”

“But you have the patience for endless human resource-” Ingrid realizes suddenly that she has no idea what human resources actually encompasses. She searches for the word– “complaints?”

“I’m trying to make the workspace better for the workforce,” Dorothea says with a wave. “Or at least, that’s what I keep reminding myself. My real personal agenda is to hire more women into companies that are _vastly_ in need of women. That’s the polite way to put it.”

“I think Sylvain would agree with you there.”

The second Ingrid says his name, her chest throbs and she can’t help the little frown that fixes itself on her face. It’s a lot harder to shake than she had hoped. She hates that she’s the one who brought him up.

Dorothea’s expression is casual and easy. “And how’s he doing?”

Ingrid hasn’t told her. She hasn’t told anyone about that night in the park. She’s not sure she wants to. Not because she’s ashamed of it, but because it feels like a moment just for her. 

“Fine,” Ingrid says, trying as best as she can to sound normal.

But Dorothea is sharp and, unfortunately, also friends with Sylvain.

“Haven’t seen him around lately,” she says, feigning a sense of casualness.

“Midterms,” Ingrid tries to explain without looking up from what little work she’s pretending to do. She’s closed all the windows on her screen so now all she’s doing is spinning the cursor around on her desktop but Dorothea doesn’t need to know that.

“Well yeah, midterms,” Dorothea waves, “but he’s usually around still.”

“I had two in one week, Dorothea.” The stray strand of hair that’s fallen into her face moves as Ingrid huffs. “So I’ve been busy.”

“That’s never stopped you before.”  
  
“That’s sort of the problem.”

Dorothea doesn’t say anything, nor does she make a disapproving sound like Ingrid might expect. Ingrid doesn’t stop glaring at her desktop screen. She thinks, if she glares hard enough, maybe the throbbing in her chest won’t be as bad. Maybe, it’ll hurt less.

It doesn’t. It never does, but Ingrid tries anyway.

A group of loud students enter the student center and Ingrid blinks back into the room, ears tuning into the sound of laughter behind them. She feels the warmth of the electric fireplace in front of them again as it continues to flicker and reaches for the to-go cup of tea she hasn’t touched in hours sitting on the coffee table in front of them. Dorothea’s eyes meet hers, an open expression of concern and regard, opening a door for conversation should Ingrid want it.

Ingrid doesn’t want it.

They go back to talking about Dorothea’s project.

* * *

* * *

Ingrid spends exactly one more week moping around. It’s all the time and space that Dorothea and Annette allow her before they barge into her room unannounced using the emergency RA keys and juggling three pints of ice cream and half a dozen take out containers from the cafeteria.

“I feel like you’re abusing your power,” Ingrid says wryly, throwing off her covers.

Were it in any other circumstance, Ingrid might have been seriously pissed about the invasion of privacy but today, she’s mostly just relieved. Her mood has tanked to an all-time low. These days, classes seem to drone on and on and the work still seems to pile up. It feels odd to feel stressed and slow at the same time. 

Ingrid’s used to pressure forcing her in quick, frantic, ready-made actions. Now it only holds and stills her. Pressing deep down onto her shoulders so hard that her knees almost shake, until the pain stretches through to her ankles—until the only thing she can focus on is the flat, archless soles of her sneakers stomping the paved stone paths that echo all the way down into the Macuil lecture halls.

“Desperate times,” Dorothea says as she hip checks the door closed after Annette settles on the floor, unpacking the food cartons.

The redhead glances around the room for a second with a frown. “Where should I put the ice cream?” she asks. 

Ingrid does not have a mini-fridge, despite how many times Samson has offered to buy her one, citing it to be a college staple. 

“In your mouth,” Dorothea replies as she plops down too. 

Annette’s brow furrows. “Before we eat?”

“As we eat,” Dorothea says. “Although, Ingrid likes to save dessert for last. Shouldn’t be a problem though because she inhales food like no one I’ve ever seen.”

Ingrid ignores the jab and slides out of her bed to crawl towards her friends. “Not this time,” she says as she reaches for the mint chocolate chip ice cream—her favorite. Well, next to the Moose Tracks one that Dorothea’s holding. “What’s all this about anyway?”

“This,” Dorothea says, waving her plastic cafeteria spoon in the air, “is your post-breakup-ice-cream-self-care extravaganza. Often seen in the teen girl romcoms you don’t watch and every other YA novel known to man.” 

Ingrid scowls, unsuccessfully trying to stab the take-out spoon into the perfect surface of a new, very frozen, ice cream carton. “We never dated.”

She doesn’t miss the look that Annette and Dorothea exchange but she doesn’t have the energy to comment on it. She knows what she said. She’s too tired to bother trying to pretend that they don’t know that something must have happened with Sylvain, that she doesn’t know exactly what they were trying to lead her to. She doesn’t have the energy to pretend she’s okay when she knows her friends are just going to call her out on it anyway.

Plus, it seems silly, in the face of all the other things in her life to mope about, Sylvain should be a small blip. A blip that’s been resolved so that she can move on and worry about everything else.

Except–

“You’re bummed out about a boy,” Dorothea says. “A boy you were spending a lot of time with who has now mysteriously and suddenly vanished from your life. That sounds like a breakup to me.” 

Ingrid carves a spoonful off the surface of the ice cream into her mouth. The sweet, minty flavor is masked slightly by the layer of frost coated over the top of it that she gets a mouthful of. 

“The breakup is a metaphor,” Annette amends quickly. When Ingrid still doesn’t answer, Annette looks uncertain but still kind. “Ingrid, you’ve been really down lately and we wanted to cheer you up, but if you want us to go...”

“No,” Ingrid shakes her head quickly. “No, I really appreciate this I’m just…”

_Dealing with the fact that this feels like a breakup._

She’s never been through a breakup before. She and Glenn didn’t break up. They just never started. 

Neither Dorothea nor Annette push her any further. Instead, they open the takeout containers and surround her with food.

That night, Ingrid laughs harder than she has all week and thoughts of schoolwork are pushed to the furthest part of her mind. Sylvain is still there, prodding, but she leaves her phone untouched the entire time.

* * *

Annette, bright sunshine Annette, wakes before Dorothea does. They had all passed out on Ingrid’s fuzzy, green, rug sometime between the scary movie they were watching and the nails that were drying. The containers from last night’s feast are stacked somewhat precariously nearby and it’s a bit of a miracle that Annette hadn’t knocked them over in her sleep.

At least they had enough sense to stack the finished ice cream cartons and cluster the plastic spoons—one cracked in half because of how dense the frozen treat was—together and out of the way.

Ingrid’s been up for a little bit, scrolling on her phone after moving to lie on top of the bed, trying to catch up on the messages she still checks in the group chat she has with the boys. Her heart still hurts a little bit every time she looks at Sylvain’s name and photo, but he seems normal enough. He seems fine. She wants to be glad about that.

Annette yawns as she rises from her position curled up next to a still-sleeping Dorothea.

“Morning,” Ingrid greets as she scoots to make room next to her for Annette.

It’s early but not monstrously early like the pre-dawn gym treks that Ingrid typically wakes for. The weekends are usually her days to sleep in just a little bit, a reprieve from her blaring alarm in favor of letting the bright yellow light of the sky wake her instead. 

It is a beautiful day outside, the window says, with the bright blue skies stretching and stretching.

Annette smiles as she settles in next to Ingrid. “Morning.”

Ingrid smiles back, slipping her phone back into the pocket of her hoodie. “How’d you sleep?”

“Okay, considering it’s the floor. That rug is really something else. Although I agree with Dorothea, it totally reminds me of grinch skin. Where’d you get it?”

“Sylvain got it for me.” 

Annette’s eyes go wide. “Oh, Ingrid, I’m sorry! Here we were trying to distract you and the first thing I say is his name!”

“It’s okay,” Ingrid says, shifting up to a sitting position, shoulder to shoulder with Annette as the covers lay over their laps. “I don’t mind. And it’s nothing like that. We didn’t get into a fight or anything.”

“Can I ask what happened?”

Ingrid presses her lips to a thin line. Her eyes drop to where her fingers trace over the blue stripes on her blankets. “I needed some space.” 

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Not really,” Ingrid sighs. “But I want to stop feeling miserable about it. I’m not...It’s harder than I thought it would be.”

“Do you want to maybe close that space?”

Absolutely. She had never really wanted space from Sylvain in the first place. Dimitri’s words keep ringing in her ears and she can’t help but feel like she’s made some monumental mistake that she’s too proud to fix.

Distance from Sylvain is supposed to give her time to reevaluate, to refocus, to turn back to school with vigor and figure out what in the world she’s to do after graduation but all it’s done is confuse her.

“I don’t know.” 

“I think that’s okay too,” Annette says, gentle and quiet. 

Ingrid sighs heavily. She doesn’t know how to explain it. She doesn’t know how to talk about it. Sylvain was—is someone she loves and now that she’s pushed him away, she wonders why it made any sense to do so in the first place. 

“I’ve got a lot on my plate,” Ingrid says carefully. “And Sylvain has a lot on his plate too. I don’t know if I can handle him right now and I don’t want—he’s about to graduate.”

Annette, ever patient, listens, even when Ingrid isn’t sure her words are making sense and waits for Ingrid to say more. When she doesn’t, Annette prods, very lightly. “Is he leaving?” 

“Well, no,” Ingrid admits. “But...I get the impression that he’s only staying because of us. I don’t want him to be disappointed by the things I can’t give him.”

Annette bites her lip. “I don’t know Sylvain like you do but I don’t think he’s going to be disappointed. If he’s staying, that’s his own choice. Not because any of you asked him to.”

“I know but–” 

She doesn’t know how to finish this. This thing with Sylvain is too much to sort through, especially since she’s so busy with everything else. “Sylvain needs attention,” she decides to say. “ _A lot_ of attention and–” _when he’s around, I want to give it to him but I can’t afford to because I’m busy and I’m a little afraid of falling more in love with him because what if he gets sick of waiting and_ “–I don’t think I can give it to him.” 

Ingrid feels an arm snake around her shoulder, feels the gentle guiding of a small, warm hand and the way it encourages her head onto Annette’s shoulder. 

“Have you actually talked to him about that?” Annette tries. “Because maybe he’ll understand more than you think.”

“It’s not fair to him,” Ingrid says into Annette’s shoulder. “He deserves more than that and I’m spreading myself thin as it is.”

“But it won’t always be this way,” her friend points out. “You’re not always going to be stressed like this.”

“I’m failing physics,” Ingrid says finally. “I can’t afford to be distracted.”

“Oh,”

“The midterm scores came back. I got a seventy-three–”

“Ingrid that’s hardly failing–”

“It’s the worst I’ve done,” Ingrid says, cutting Annette off. She knows what Annette will try to say. She knows that she’ll have another chance to raise her grade later but it still sits uncomfortably in her chest. “Ever. And I’m afraid it’ll only get worse if Sylvain’s around. He’s loud and...and he’s just so _Sylvain_. I can’t let myself be distracted by him.” 

Annette is quiet for a moment. Ingrid feels a gentle hand brushing through her short hair, offering silent, easy comfort. It’s nice, actually. 

“Ingrid,” Annette starts, but then she hesitates. “Actually, nevermind.”

Ingrid shifts up, sees Annette’s contemplative face and then sighs. “What is it, Annette?”

Annette bites her lip. She looks Ingrid over for a second, considering, before finally speaking, “It’s just—how much more distracted are you right now without him?” 

Ingrid stills. She doesn’t have an answer for that.

“I’m sorry,” Annette says quickly, “it’s not my place–”

“No,” Ingrid decides. “No, it’s okay.”

It’s a good question.

Ingrid lets herself contemplate it as Annette stays by her side.

They stay like that for a while.

* * *

Felix’s voice breaks through the music in the headphones she borrowed from Dorothea, startling her in the middle of her stretching routine on the floor. He’s in-between sets and sweaty, hair tied up into a messy bun with his tank top glued to his skin and standing beside her. 

“You okay?”

Ingrid glances down. She’s got her legs spread out wide and is leaning to one side, her hand reaching her old training shoes. “Yeah?”

Felix’s frown deepens. “You’ve been stretching that one leg for the past three minutes.”

Ingrid immediately switches, bending to reach her other foot and not quite reaching it all the way comfortably. “Oh, thanks.”

Felix grunts. She watches him hesitate, staring down at his kettlebells for a second before his eyes resettle back onto Ingrid’s form. “Maybe you should take a break.”

“I’m stretching,” she says. “Is this not a break?”

“I mean,” he amends, “for the next few days.”

“I have a schedule.”

“Break your schedule.”

“Felix.”

“Ingrid,” he says. “You’re not focused and you aren’t yourself. You’re going to hurt yourself.”

She wants to retort but she doesn’t have a response that will win. Felix will see through it all.

“This isn’t helping,” Felix says. “If anything, it’s stressing you out more.”

“I enjoy exercise,” Ingrid says as she pulls her legs back to sit cross-legged. “And I like to see you. Also, aren’t you supposed to be advocating for exercise?”

Felix kneels in front of her. “We can see each other anytime. We just choose to do this together.” Then, he adds, “And, for the record, I advocate for not hurting yourself.”

She huffs, annoyed at his hypocrisy. Ingrid distinctly remembers strong periods of his overtraining as some form of messed-up coping mechanism. “This is the easiest way,” she says.

“It’s also not the only way. Don’t be so stubborn. If you want to see me, then just see me.”

“The great Felix Hugo Fraldarius, telling me not to be so stubborn? The nerve,” she jokes.

Neither of them laugh. Felix’s frown only deepens. He crosses his arms in front of her as if to further prove his displeasure. “You’re both fools.”

Ingrid swears the hairs on the back of her neck stands up. It would be pointless to dodge and pretend she doesn’t know what he’s talking about - who he’s talking about, not when Felix is practically demanding it from her point-blank. 

He would never stand for it. She’s also tired of weakly trying to pretend her moroseness away. It’s why she let Dimitri sit in front of her in the cafeteria and why she didn’t bat away Annette or Dorothea when they barged into her room. She’s never been a good liar. She had just been hoping that her friends would be polite enough not to say anything.

“He didn’t do anything wrong,” she says, fiddling with her shoelaces. “This one’s on me.” 

Felix scoffs. “Doubtful. If there are two people and one problem, then both of you did something wrong.” 

“He really didn’t,” she tries again. Sylvain has been nothing but sweet and gracious and generous. He has asked for nothing from her, even though she knows he wants to. Even though he deserves to. “I asked for some space and he gave it to me.”

“Neither of you want space.” 

Ingrid groans and stands. She’s lost track of how much time she’s spent on not stretching her legs. She walks to the water fountain just so she doesn’t have to see Felix’s disapproving face. “I am incredibly busy,” she says as she leans over the fountain while he trails behind her.

Felix says nothing. He waits until she’s done taking a sip.

He’s very good at this, at coercing words out of her without saying anything in return. It’s infuriating. She always feels the need to explain. She loves him but he’s always been a bit judgemental. 

“I can’t handle a boyfriend right now.” 

It feels ridiculous to say.

When she turns, Felix still has his arms crossed. She feels the need to mirror him so she does and hopes that he backs away first. He has never ever been good with this kind of talk. They stay out of each other’s romances. It has always been this way. If there has ever been anyone who could tease it out of them, it’s Sylvain. 

“At least you admit that there’s a…” he pauses, trying to find the word, “ _thing_ between you two now.”

Hearing it from Felix takes some of the tension and breath out of her. The coiling anxiety waiting to snap out in the form of anger dissipates into that added weight back onto her shoulders. Her knees feel heavy again and her shoes like stone. 

She grimaces. “I never denied it. We just never talked about it.” Felix’s expression doesn’t change. She shifts. “I thought you didn’t want to hear about stuff like this.”

Felix drops his arms. He softens, just barely, and his voice no longer carries his firm, harsh tone. “I do when it bothers you this much.”

Something lifts. 

It’s her shoes. She takes the tiniest step towards him. “Thanks Felix,” she says.

He nods. “Look Ingrid, I’m not...good at this. I’m not Sylvain or Dimitri–”

Ingrid snorts. “Dimitri is also terrible at this.”

“We’re all fucking terrible at this,” he says, before shoving his hands into the pockets of his shorts. “I don’t like to talk about stuff like this. But that doesn’t mean I don’t care about you. You and Sylvain? You’re both miserable. Do something about it.”

Ingrid blinks, surprised. Felix is rarely this open. He is biting remarks, casual comments, finding ways to show he cares in the most roundabout ways. He is sharp and subtle, somehow. It took her years to learn how to read the way he loves. She no longer looks for his words so it takes her a moment to adjust to hearing it out and open. 

He begins to redden when she doesn’t say anything.

“I care about you too, Felix,” she says. This has definitely been said before but they always pretend it away.

“That’s not–” he sighs, frustrated. “I know that–”

“It’s nice to hear. And you said it first.” 

“Well don’t make me say it again if I don’t have to.”

“What if I ask you to?”

He grumbles, “I’ll do it but I won’t be happy about it.” 

She laughs and watches the corner of his lips curl into the smallest almost-smile. 

For a moment, they are quiet. He lets her settle into a lighter version of herself, the version of Ingrid that comes out when Dimitri buys her tea or when the girls force her to watch bad movies, or all those moments Sylvain steals from her. 

In the silence between them, all those whirling thoughts of an uncertain future and the regrets of lost literature loves, of lost actual loves, are pushed further back in Ingrid’s mind. Instead, she focuses on the fond amusement she feels when Felix’s shifts awkwardly as he lets himself be vulnerable for her comfort.

He’s really grown up too. Even if he’s still Felix. 

She walks past him, plopping down on the yoga mat she had left on the ground, patting the space next to her.

He smiles as he drops down. “I thought you were going to hug me.” 

The relief in his voice makes her laugh. “Do you want me to?” she can’t help but tease.

“I’m sweaty and disgusting.”

“You didn’t answer the question.”

“No,” he says firmly. “But you can if you need to.” 

Ingrid grins before stretching out to lay down. Felix has to scoot a bit but the angle makes it easy to see his face, looking over at her. “Thanks, I appreciate it.”

He grunts some form of acknowledgment. They quiet again and she watches the screen on his fitness watch count his heartbeat back to resting. 

“Is he miserable?” Ingrid asks. “Truly?”

Felix throws her an incredulous look. “Do you really have to ask?”

“He seems fine over the group messages.”

“He seemed fine when we were kids too.” 

Ingrid frowns. They all knew he hadn’t been but only because there was no way he could have been. “Yeah, but I was there for that. I haven’t seen him lately.”

Felix bumps her thigh with his elbow. “That's your choice.”

She hums, blinking her eyes closed. Sylvain’s face drifts to mind. She doesn’t shake it away. “I guess I was trying not to think about it. I never wanted to hurt him.”

“You did what you had to do for you,” he says. “That’s not a bad thing.”

“But it makes me feel like I’m being selfish,” she admits with a sigh. “I knew it would hurt him. I did it anyway.”

“You figured out what you wanted,” he says. “Sylvain understands. He’ll figure things out on his own.”

That might be the problem. What she knows she has to do for herself, for her school, her career, for her future—it’s not what her heart wants for herself right now. 

She misses Sylvain, deeply and dearly. She misses how he could take her out of her head and spin her heart in ways that she has never thought possible. She thought she had known what love was once, but Sylvain feels different, cliche as it sounds. 

She doesn’t want him to figure it out. Because figuring it out means that he’s fine. It means he’s gone. It means he’s not going to come back for her.

She is the one that let him go. She asked him not to wait. It’s for both their sakes. She just thought it would be easier to bear. 

“I thought you thought we were both fools.”

“You are,” Felix says before bringing his hand up to his neck to rub at it, “but I’m starting to realize that this is more complicated than two people who have feelings for each other.”

Ingrid chews her lip. “I wish it wasn’t.” 

“Does it have to be?” he asks. “Is there no way you can work this out?”

She thinks about Sylvain and his smile. She thinks about all the trouble she feels brewing in her chest and in her head and how he’s finally happy. She doesn’t want him to have to carry her. 

“Not in any way I can see.”

“So, what’s the plan?”

“To wait,” she says, waving absently in the air. “Until this goes away.”

He throws her a sharp disapproving look. “You can’t avoid him forever. He’s too annoying. He’ll come to pester you eventually.”

“And until that happens, I’m going to avoid him.”

Felix snorts. “Yeah, we’ll see how that goes.”

They lie there for a while, abandoning the rest of their gym time so that Ingrid can mope on the mat, until several more students come barging into the room and it becomes too silly and too pathetic to sink into the gross, sweaty floor.

She appreciates Felix all the same for staying by her the whole time and not saying another word.

* * *

**Transcription Beta:**

“Oh, Ingrid, I’m sorry I missed your call. Things have just been so busy here but I have some time tomorrow around noon if you wanted to chat? Let me know.”

Was this transcription [useful](https://twitter.com/SylvgridBigBang) or [not useful?](https://twitter.com/SylvgridBigBang)

* * *

Downtown bustles with too many people. Ingrid is used to crowds. Between the very busy high school halls, the locker rooms after practice or a game, the way people always cluster in the student center or pack into the library, and the lecture halls with too many familiar faces but not enough names she knows, she is used to people.

She is not anti-social, nor is she the type to hide in her room for days on end and wallow into her pillow, but the rhythm of a downtown city street is different than that of an isolated university campus and it throws her off. Everyone looks different here. Everyone has different purposes.

Ingrid cannot imagine herself in the too-tall, giant skyscraper buildings that surround her. She cannot count the number of people that must be hiding inside, living independent lives so far removed from her own. It feels too alien to her and, for the briefest of seconds, she wonders if there is anything in them at all. She will never know, she thinks.

Ingrid is too early. The time allows her mind to wander just a little too much, flitting from one thought to another quickly, even as she stands stock-still doing nothing, holding the two coffees she bought just to kill time and tracking the thrumming beats of a city using the old, well-worn wristwatch Samson once gave her.

From here, with all the noise and busses and cars and people, those giant, one-tone buildings could stretch forever upwards towards the sun. Ingrid could never reach them. 

She bites her lip, squinting up in expectation of bright light but only meeting the cast of the building’s looming shadow stretching over before her phone buzzes in her pocket. 

It is almost time to meet up with Mercedes.

Ingrid makes her way to the other side of the street where the large hospital campus is dwarfed and boxed in by the towers around them. It reminds her of a toddler’s woodblock puzzle where someone has stuffed a too-small square peg into the hole that doesn’t quite fit.

The electric sliding doors of the entrance whistle. 

It only takes a moment for Mercedes to see her, wearing the warm smile that only comes from meeting an old friend you haven’t seen in a while. 

“Ingrid!” The woman beams and half-jogs over, encircling Ingrid in a brief but comforting hug. 

Ingrid is not sure what she had expected from Mercedes. Perhaps she had expected something dramatically different. Perhaps she had expected for Mercedes to come striding out with a stethoscope, glasses, and a clipboard in a white lab coat with her head held high up in an air of something proper and elegant. 

It seems silly now, that image in her head, when the real Mercedes stands in front of her, wearing a casual, light, black jacket to shelter herself from the slight spring breeze over blue wrinkled scrubs and worn trainer shoes, hair cut short into a bob and brushed away to reveal the kind of tired eyes that come from more than a lack of sleep and no makeup.

“Mercedes!” Ingrid breathes, feeling strangely relieved. “It’s so good to see you. Thanks for meeting me.”

Ingrid offers the spare, full cup of coffee to Mercedes. “I got you something from the cart,” she says but then is struck by the sudden memory that she’s positive that Mercedes prefers tea. “I wasn’t sure what you liked so–“

Mercedes smiles and the worn lines on her face disappear as she takes the cup from Ingrid with both hands. “Oh that’s so thoughtful of you, Ingrid,” she says. “Thank you. I hardly get enough sleep these days.”

Ingrid frowns. “Is that so?”

Mercedes waves it away. “Nothing to worry about. I’ll catch up eventually. Shall we?”

Mercedes gestures to the street and Ingrid nods, following. It’s lunchtime now. The office block of this district filters out with way too many clusters of people, all rushing for afternoon air after a morning spent inside.

“Oh,” Mercedes says, bringing a hand up to shade over her eyes, squinting as they reach the crosswalk. “It’s so bright today.”

Ingrid looks around at all the long shadows on the street but doesn’t comment.

Mercedes’ smile is small and soft. “Sometimes I get so wrapped up in what goes on inside the hospital that I forget what the world looks like, you know?”

Ingrid thinks of the fluorescents in the conference room and the endless old metal sheet stacks in the library. She thinks about window shades drawn closed and studying by lamplight on a cramped desk as her walls shake from a booming beat she barely hears. 

“Yeah, I understand.”

The little red hand on the street signal turns into a person and Ingrid matches Mercedes’ quick-paced stride as they make their way out into the world.

* * *

They don’t go very far. Mercedes has to run back to the hospital after their lunch date and Ingrid has to get back to campus sooner rather than later, but there’s a nice little cafe that serves sandwiches so they settle into the green, metal, patio chairs.

“Oh this is so lovely,” Mercedes says after they order, glancing around. The busy, low hum is a comfort to Ingrid and the background white noise blends in well with the smell of coffee and food.

“Thanks again for meeting me, Mercedes.” 

The older woman waves it away. “Anything for a friend.” 

Something warms in Ingrid’s chest at the sentiment. They hadn’t been particularly close and are just far enough apart in age to nearly miss each other in school. They’d only met because of Annette but Mercedes has never been anything but kind to her.

Ingrid pushes through the slow blush forming on her face. “Still, I know you’re busy and I didn’t want to take up too much of your time...”

“Oh, we’re all busy but if I let that stop me then what kind of life would I be living?” 

Ingrid frowns, tapping her fingers on the table. “That’s actually what I wanted to talk to you about.” 

Mercedes quirks her head to the side. “How busy I am?”

“Medical school and how busy it is.”

“Oh, it’s busy.” Mercedes laughs but not bitterly, “But, you get through it.”

Ingrid’s not sure what she had expected.

Mercedes smiles. “Are you still considering it?” 

“I am,” Ingrid says with a frown.

Ingrid had prepared a bunch of questions for Mercedes earlier but now that she’s sitting across from her, staring at the blue hospital scrubs and the kind face of an almost-doctor, she doesn’t quite know how to ask.

Maybe she should have written them down.

“I guess I’d just like to know what the process is like?” Ingrid tries.

“The process?” Mercedes hums, tilting her head. “You mean for your applications?”

“Yes,” Ingrid says. “And what that was like for you.”

“Well it’s relatively straightforward as long as you’ve taken and passed your prerequisites and your grades are up to par,” Mercedes explains. “Which I understand you’re in the process of doing. Other than that, you need to take the admissions examination, which is eight hours long by the way.”

Ingrid’s frown deepens. Her eyes fall back onto her fingers, now tracing lines onto the table. “Eight hours?”

Mercedes giggles. “Just wait until Step 3.” 

Ingrid’s brow furrows, fingers curling as she looks back up at Mercedes. “What’s that?”

“One of the other very long exams you’ll have,” Mercedes sighs before waving it away. Her tone changes, snapping into something much more businesslike. “But, that’s not for a very long time, Ingrid, so don’t you worry about that for now. What I would do if I were you is research and narrow down the schools you’re interested in and see what they require. In the meantime, you should also gather your references, continue to do well in your classes, and get yourself into an exam preparatory program a little closer to the date of your intended exam. Then, when you’re ready to apply, it’s a few personal statements and interviews. It’s not too unlike applying to university, to be honest.” 

Ingrid nods as the information spins in her head. Her mental checklist reappears except, instead of crawling around the bottom of the list, the application process shoots up to the top, way above her weekly modules and the call she still needs to make home. 

“How is it?” Ingrid asks. “School itself?”

“Hard,” Mercedes answers with simple effective honesty. “Really difficult, but incredibly rewarding. You’ll have days where it feels impossible–where you’ll question if you’re the right fit. It’s both incredibly humbling and occasionally humiliating.” 

“You sound like you’re talking me out of it.”

“I’m not talking you out of anything,” Mercedes says. “But I refuse to lie to you about it. It doesn’t get any easier, not truly. You’ll have moments or areas of study where you shine, where you are so sure that this is how you do things, where you know the answer, but just as quickly as those come, they will also go. But you’ll learn to manage it. Although you could argue that that’s the same with anything you choose to earnestly pursue.”

The coiling in Ingrid’s gut does not ease but it does not get worse either. “I see.” 

Mercedes leans forward, placing both her hands flat on the table between them. “But you know all this already.”

Ingrid bites her lip. “I just wanted some first-hand perspective.”

“And I’m happy to provide it Ingrid,” Mercedes says in a tone that makes Ingrid bristle. “But something tells me you didn’t make the trek all the way here for something you could have learned from a quick Crestogle search.”

Ingrid meets Mercedes’ eyes. Her checklist falls away and she’s back again, in a quaint little cafe near the hospital sitting in front her friend. 

“I just–” she starts and stops.

Mercedes doesn’t say anything but her hand finds Ingrid’s forearm and encourages her along.

“I had a plan,” Ingrid breathes. The past tense feels heavy in her chest. “I always knew what I wanted to do and how to get there and now–”

“It’s okay to say it, Ingrid.”

“Now, I don’t know,” Ingrid admits, rubbing at her temples. “Now I’m wondering if I wanted to go to medical school for the right reasons at all.”

“What are the right reasons?”

Ingrid looks away from the kindness Mercedes gives so freely and back outwards onto the street. A car whizzes by. 

“You can say it, Ingrid,” Mercedes’ voice cuts in again. “I promise you, I’ve heard it all before.”

“I wonder if I chose it because it was easy. Not easy as in the work, I—you’re right,” she tries to explain. The words don’t feel quite right in her mouth but the hand on her arm is steady and unwavering so Ingrid continues on. “I know that it won’t be easy to actually be in it, to do it, that school is school and that the work is hard, but easy as in, it was an easy choice to make. It was something good and noble—where I can help people but also because–”

Something gets caught in her throat. Ingrid thinks, maybe, it’s shame. 

Mercedes, uncompromised, urges her along with a smile.

“I wanted something stable.” Ingrid finally sighs, “and something I could see with an easy path forward. I want to be able to support my family and have a career that everyone could be proud of.”

“And now?”

“I still want that,” Ingrid says, “but, medical school is just soexpensive and things are...more complicated than it should be. It’s more of _this_ and–”

Mercedes’ brow furrows, hand squeezing on Ingrid’s forearm a little. “This?”

“Stress,” Ingrid exhales, hanging her head a little. “Long, long periods of stress.”

Mercedes leans back and breathes a small, quiet almost sigh. “I’m not really sure that ever goes away. Medical school or not,” she says gently, pulling her hand back. “The key is finding a way to balance it.” 

“No, I know that but–” Ingrid bites her lip. “It’s just a very long time, Mercedes. To be stressed. To focus on school and nothing else.”

Mercedes smiles. “Ah, I see.”

“What?” 

“School-life balance,” Mercedes explains. “And then, eventually, work-life balance. It’s hard, but people do it. You can do it too. I don’t believe your life is only school, Ingrid. Mine certainly isn’t, even now. Although it may feel like that sometimes.”

Ingrid hangs her head and stares at her hands, now pulled into her lap. “I’m struggling now,” she admits for the first time out loud in the safety of a cafe and Mercedes’ company. She thinks about Hanneman and the way this second semester of physics is killing her and the seventy-three on her midterm score. “And, if I go to med school, I know that that’s where my attention will be. That’s where it has to be.” 

Mercedes frowns just a little. ”Have you considered the possibility that the way you measure your life may be a little skewed?”

Ingrid blinks and tilts her head, just a little. 

Mercedes continues, “life isn’t just one thing at a time. You can’t tell me that your life is only school. There must be other things you do.”

“It doesn’t feel like it,” Ingrid says. “It feels like I don’t have any time to think about anything but school.”

“You’re talking to me now, aren’t you?”

“Talking about school!” Ingrid says, frustrated. “Or, well, a topic closely related to the topic of school.” 

“You aren’t studying every second of the day, Ingrid,” Mercedes says. “We’re not just machines that go through our lives as if other things don’t affect us. It’ll be the same in med school and then into residency and then into your career but while that’s happening there will also be pockets of time to do other things. Those pockets of time are part of the whole of the experience of your life and they mean something too. You aren’t just school, Ingrid.” 

“Maybe I should be.” 

“Why?”

“Because it’s easier if I am!”

Ingrid does not huff. Her heart chest is not heaving but she wishes it were. She wishes she were that dramatic and that her little outburst made her feel better. She wishes it were cathartic. 

Mercedes, to her credit, does not flinch nor does she seem alarmed. Instead, she asks again, squeezing Ingrid’s arm, “Why?”

Ingrid bites hard on her lip, staring back down at her hands. “It’s all I know,” she admits. “It’s all I know how to be good at but now I’m not even sure if I’m really good at it anymore.”

“You’re not used to failing, are you?” Mercedes says gently. “We’re not perfect, Ingrid. It’s normal to struggle.”

The frustration that wells up inside Ingrid feels like it has nowhere to go. No outlet. “I can’t afford to struggle,” Ingrid says again. “Because if I trip up now, if this is so hard, what does that say about later?”

Mercedes’ lips turn downward, but she’s not frowning exactly, more like she’s trying to sympathize. “You’re so young, Ingrid–”

“–I don’t feel young,” Ingrid grumbles, slightly annoyed.

“You are,” Mercedes insists, not minding the interruption. “You’ve been in school your entire life and it’s hard to figure things like that out when you’ve never taken the time to. Have you considered taking a gap year to think about it? It’s very common.” 

“I don’t know if I can.” Ingrid lets out a bitter laugh. It's all she's willing to let go because she’s fighting the sudden powerful urge to burst into a bout of stress-filled tears. “I have _so_ many loans, Mercedes, and I’ll need a job and if I’m focused on that then when will I have the time to study and apply if I do want to? And, if I end up doing it, I’ll just feel like I wasted a year when I could have spent that year in school, getting to a place where I can eventually work.”

“Wasted a year by what measurement?” Mercedes challenges even as she pats Ingrid’s hand. “You feel like you’re running out of time but you’re not. It’s not a race, Ingrid, and whatever you decide to do, I have complete faith in the fact that you’ll be able to do it. There are plenty of avenues for you. You just have to find the path you want to walk and stop feeling guilty that the things you want in life might have changed or that maybe you never really wanted those things in the first place.” 

Ingrid blinks. “What?”

“It’s okay to change your mind, Ingrid. It’s okay for your desires to evolve and change even when you thought you wanted something for so long. Even now,” she says. “Goddess knows I’ve changed my mind plenty of times.”

Ingrid’s head snaps up. “You have?”

“Yes,” Mercedes says kindly, “I thought, perhaps I should be a teacher—that’s how Annie and I met actually—then there was a stint where I was sure I would open a bakery. I even worked at one for quite a while before I finally decided that this was what I wanted to do. Then, this year, I spent a lot of time deciding how I wanted to do it and mulled over possible specialties.”

Ingrid looks up and takes a good, hard look at Mercedes and her tired, exhausted eyes and slightly unkempt hair. She sees how Mercedes’ shoulders slouch just a bit and feels the cracked skin of hands that are washed too often without much care for moisturizing. 

Mercedes pulls back again, leaning against the back of her chair, and when she speaks, her voice is soft but firm. “It’s a lot to ask a person what they want to do for a life so long that we can never properly envision.” 

“I don’t know how not to worry about my future, especially when it’s so unclear.” 

“I’m not saying you shouldn’t,” Mercedes replies. “A little worry is fine and we should plan for things or else we’ll never get to where we want to go. I’m just saying that your life is happening now and not in ten or twenty years.” 

Ingrid’s heard this before. She is sure that everyone’s heard some version of this speech. She thinks she might have said this to herself in some mirror when she thinks about Sylvain too much or when she stuffs herself in some classroom until way after dark. She thinks that this is the exact reason she came to Mercedes in the first place. To see the tired eyes of a friend she thinks is too perfect tell Ingrid things she already knows because maybe the weapon of those words wielded in Mercedes’ almost-doctor hands could beat back some of the way Ingrid’s stubborn mind holds onto some idea of a future she doesn’t yet know if she wants. 

“In the meantime,” Mercedes says, as Ingrid lets the words settle. “While you’re figuring all that out, a good friend of mine is an excellent physics tutor.”

Ingrid startles. “How did you–”

Then, she thinks, _Annette._

“Because it killed me too,” Mercedes laughs behind her hand. “Made me wonder if I was good enough or if I even wanted to bother struggling.”

Ingrid gives Mercedes the most relieved smile she can. 

“Sometimes,” Mercedes says, “we get so stressed out and focused on the one thing we’re struggling the most with that everything else feels a hundred times harder too.”

Ingrid takes a deep breath. “Okay,” she says. “Maybe I’ll start there.”

* * *

* * *

Mercedes returns to work not too long afterward. She had been spot on when she deduced that Ingrid had been looking for something from her, but Ingrid still needs more time to see if what they had talked about would change anything at all.

Ingrid wishes that a heart-to-heart or a level headed voice would easily guide her to simple revelations that could so easily be enacted. She wishes that would be enough for her to abandon the way she has always done things, to rid her shoulders of that stress and tension she holds onto, but her mind is not so simple that only Mercedes’ gentle logic can take away her heart. Ingrid is too used to holding herself to a very specific standard.

If Ingrid’s honest, if she truly thinks about it, she might be able to attribute a lot of the ways the last few weeks—truly, the last few years—have weighed on her to two simple things:

Pride and fear.

It’s that pride of the person she has always thought she was and should be and the refusal to let it go that has her so rigid and unwilling to deviate, to hold onto some ideal of herself that she is terrified she can no longer live up to.

Terrified she no longer wants to.

Ingrid has a whole host of things back on campus that she needs to deal with. She has RA duties to attend to. She has things that are due tomorrow, the day after, next week, and so on, until the date of her graduation. But today, under the falling sunlight, Ingrid finds herself beneath a tree in some plaza by a random downtown building next to a pretty fountain that spouts endless streams of water as Mercedes’ words bounce around in her head. It is proving difficult to align her heart with the sound logic of a woman much wiser than her. 

The plaza is mostly empty except for a smattering of people on break. Ingrid sits, thumb hovering over a contact on her phone.

She’s trying to find the part of her that used to be brave.

The stone plaza echoes when she scuffs her shoes on the ground. A bird cautiously makes its way towards her, hoping for food. Ingrid has nothing for it. All she has is a pounding heart and strangely steady fingers.

She hits call.

Ingrid counts three rings before the voice on the other side says hello. 

“Hi, Dad.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did I have to add Hubert on my phone to get that screenshot? Yes. Yes, I did.
> 
> Also! I had so much help from [sunni](https://twitter.com/ohgee_sunnilee) for that Mercedes' conversation. So thank you for that friend!


	5. we've reached the end of the line

* * *

The city beats a careful, steady rhythm into Ingrid’s sneaker-clad steps as she wanders farther away from the center of that needlepoint skyline. Behind her, the tallest tower in town serves as a lighthouse beacon to those who thirst for more in sleepy, small towns with little houses. She always thought she would be one of them. 

She used to dream of more. 

Now though, there’s only the echo of father’s voice next to a flutter in her chest as it whispers some old, warm image of home.

It’s the path to the porch steps of the little house she grew up in, guarded by the once-white front gate. The rattling, rusted latch that her father always meant to fix but never had time to would always take two or three good yanks before it finally flew open, only to clank-slam shut again shortly after.

The sound of that metal gate latch would drift into her bedroom through a permanent crack left from a window that couldn’t close all the way. Ingrid never minded it, not even when the world grew just a touch too cold.

Once, Dimitri had torn the entire latch off with his bare-knuckled hands after bursting through the gate a bit too forcefully. His rapid-fire apologies to her mother at the front of the house had drawn Ingrid to peer out of her bedroom window and below into the yard just in time to see Sylvain leap over the gate only to slip and tumble face-first into her mother’s lilacs. 

Her own laugh had been cut short by Felix’s. She remembers the relief she felt when it carried into her bedroom, loud and deep. Real. Something she had missed dearly back then when Glenn was almost certainly dying.

They all scrambled out onto her roof once Dimitri pried her window free afterward. All coaxed by a desire to touch the sky–by the need to get out of Fhirdiad, away from family, and the youth that they felt restricted them.

Those rooftop talks were sacred to a bunch of kids with nowhere to go that time would yet allow. The calmness that came from staring out into the quiet street and empty neighborhood overtook any fear of falling.

Ingrid can’t remember what they talked about. The exact details of those conversations no longer seem to matter.

What matters instead is the quiet nostalgia that envelops her with warmth when she finally reaches the raised, wooden flowerbed in front of Sylvain’s downtown apartment with that memory in her heart. 

Then she waits. 

Then she wonders. 

Then she hopes that she’s not too late.

* * *

_“Hi Darling, how are you?”_

One of Ingrid’s hands curl against the edge of the wooden plaza bench she sits on. The other grips tighter around the phone in its hand. She doesn’t know how to answer the question honestly so she answers it routinely. “I’m okay. How about you?”

There’s a shuffling on the other side and the slam of a metal something. “I”m good. I’m glad you called Ingrid. I missed your voice.” 

The warmth that catches in her chest is bigger than the guilt she feels for dodging his calls. “I miss you too,” she says quietly. “Are you at home right now?” 

Her father’s voice on the other end sings in a soft, slow baritone. “Yes, I am. I’m off today. How’d you know?”

“The gate,” Ingrid says simply. 

“That’s your mother.” Something shuffles in the background. “She’s having some trouble with the snowdrops, I think.”

“That’s surprising.” Ingrid smiles. Her next words are a little quiet, close to a mumble. “Mom’s always been really great at that.”

The loud booming guffaw on the other side startles her, bringing her eyes up from where she had been staring at the tips of her shoes against the plaza tile and up, as if trying to catch the eye of someone right in front of her. “Not always. Not every garden grows flowers.” 

Ingrid’s brows furrow deeply even though she knows her father can't see her. “What?” 

She envisions her father’s face, smiling with those calm tired eyes as he says, “Darling, you just never see the flowers that don’t bloom.” 

* * *

Ingrid loses track of the time she spends outside waiting for Sylvain. She’s tried his apartment buzzer already but no one answered. She considers calling but her phone is almost dead and she’s not sure that a call wouldn’t accidentally start a conversation they should have in-person.

So she rehearses her words, trying to find the best way to explain everything swimming in her head. It’s hard. All this time, she’s spent most of her energy on avoiding it. Perhaps, some part of her had been afraid of her words because to say them out loud would make them real and tangible. 

And yet, they are real.

She has a strange feeling that the second she sees Sylvain, anything she plans will be lost. They will get caught somewhere between her heart and his. Her words will fail the second she looks into his eyes. 

She remembers how sad he’d looked when she pulled away that night at the park. She’s afraid of seeing that again.

She can’t feign ignorance to his feelings for her. Not anymore. They had danced around each other for some time. For her own good, she had ignored it. She had pretended that there was nothing.

She’s been selfish, she knows. 

Sylvain has always been so patient with her, kind with her, but there’s a limit to it. All this time, he’d been building towards something. All this time, she had let him. 

Then she closed the door.

Sylvain is not as selfish as he makes himself out to be. It’s why he’s given her so much space despite, if Felix is to be believed at least, his misery. It’s his tendency for self-sacrifice, born from a leftover sense of masochism and bred from a family history that will probably never go away. Ingrid had never wanted to take advantage of that–never thought she could–until she did.

Now she wants to try again.

She wants to make up for that. She wants to explain. He deserves the explanation, even if he never asked for one.

So, tonight, she waits for him with her hands shoved deep into the pockets of her hoodie. She waits even as the sun moves further and further down–waits as the light ducks behind the buildings and hills on the horizon, the spring wind blowing softly and slowly against the ends of her hair. 

* * *

_“I didn’t realize you were a poet,”_ Ingrid says, but the attempt at a lighthearted joke falls flat. 

Her father either doesn’t notice or decides not to comment on it. He continues instead: “Your mother gets a little embarrassed sometimes. She doesn’t want anyone to see her fail. Most people tend to put the best impressions of themselves first. Why wouldn’t we?”

“Do you do it?”

Her father is quiet for a moment. She hears a soft breath before he speaks again. “I do.”

There’s something implied there. Ingrid feels it. It gives her enough courage for her own confession. “I guess I took after you both.”

Her father’s laugh is musical. Her heart squeezes, but it is not painful. It is not the longing wistful one she feels when she dreams of home and family either. It is a comforting, soft present thing.

“Samson might be the only one that doesn’t,” he says. The tone he takes, fond and kind, allows Ingrid to imagine her father smiling. It has been a long time since she thought of her father smiling at Samson’s name, not when it once brought him shame. “He has no sense of fear, that one. I have no idea where he gets it from.”

“Some would call that brave.” 

“I suppose that’s one way to put it.”

Ingrid’s hands clench. She remembers the fight. She remembers Samson and her father going at it about her brother’s future. She does not want to revisit the memory. 

The static on the line stretches between them. Ingrid bites down a little too hard on her lips and plays with a loose thread on her sleeve.

“We just want what’s best for you all,” her father says finally–suddenly. “That’s all.”

She thinks of Samson–of the fallout when he declined to apply for school. She thinks of her brother driving across the continent, further and further away from all of them. 

“I know,” Ingrid says. She loops the thread around her index finger and pulls, breaking it off. “I understand.” 

* * *

She sees Sylvain first. He’s scrolling on his phone with his sports coat thrown over one of his shoulders and leather briefcase slung on his other one. Even from this distance, she can tell he’s exhausted. 

She does not call out to him. She tries to but he looks up before she gets a chance. He freezes when he sees her, halting underneath the brightest part of the lamplight nearby. 

Ingrid rises from where she had been sitting on the edge of the flowerbed. Her hands twitch and drum in time with her racing heart. She watches him blink dumbly at her, phone still raised before taking a breath as if it were sacred–slow and deep with a calm rise and careful fall.

He smiles at her: a little unsure, a little weak, and not at all confident. She has not seen this Sylvain in a long time, self-conscious like he’s fourteen, slowing his pace behind Samson and Glenn to match his stride with Dimitri as the older boys race off ahead. 

The image vanishes quickly, a flash memory tucked back away to time. 

Ingrid, nervous and unsure too, returns his smile.

It does something to him. His demeanor shifts, ever so slightly, and the unsure boy disappears. He is replaced by the man with kind, open eyes and a calm smile.

It is the Sylvain that she fell in love with.

He does not say hi. Neither does she.

“I thought we’d fizzle out,” Ingrid says instead. All of her million, frantic thoughts about this conversation solidify into a single, blurry path–one which she cannot see the end to.

Sylvain does not say anything. He lets her pause and fumble, pocketing his phone with one hand and curling around his leather strap with the other. He is patient with her in a way that she has sincerely missed in the last few weeks without him. It is a patience she hadn’t believed he was capable of when they were younger when his tongue was nothing but quick quips for cheap laughs. 

“I was hoping that we’d fizzle out,” she confesses, throat tired and a little dry. She swallows through it. “It would be easier if we fizzled out. Then, maybe it wouldn’t hurt so much.”

“I don’t want us to fizzle out.” His voice is quiet and faraway with a trace of the sadness he tries to shield. He does not step forward like she expects him to. He does not close the space between them.

Her fingers dance and twist together as her stomach does. The distance makes her nervous. His words are comforting but he’s still wary. She knows it’s because she’s hurt him. 

She barrels on.

“Glenn and I fizzled out.”

Sylvain’s lips press into a thin line. His hands clench tighter around the strap.

“I loved him.” 

It is the first time she has ever admitted that to Sylvain. She knows that he knows. She knows that Felix and Dimitri do too, but she has never said it to any of them. Not like this–not this plainly. 

“Glenn was easy to love. He was older. He was kind. He took the time to talk to me even when I was just a little girl trailing after him. I loved him for a very long time but nothing ever happened.”

Sylvain shifts, shoving his hand into his pocket. His eyes dart away from hers to the ground. Ingrid breathes and lets them both settle. She lets the words in her chest and heart—the ones about to crawl right up her throat and spill out in some ugly unintelligible way—still for a second. She wills him, silently, to look at her again.

“Until it did.”

Sylvain’s eyes snap to hers. His breath is sharp as his frown deepens. 

Her heart hammers as he looks at her. He’s tense and his expression is dark. 

Sylvain is a very good liar, but in front of her, right now, under that lamplight as the moon peeks behind one of the large towers several blocks away, his heart is on his sleeve.

She doesn’t want to hurt him more than she already has. She knows he probably won’t want to hear this but she owes him an explanation and this is the only way that it comes out.

“Before I started at Garreg Mach, we spent the summer together and I was finally, _finally,_ old enough and Glenn was right there. We danced around each other. Kind of like...kind of like us.”

“I know,” Sylvain says, short and clipped. “I was there for that.”

“I know.” Ingrid breathes so heavily that she’s sure that the warmth in her lungs reaches him, even across the large gap between them. “But Glenn and I never really happened because the timing was off. Or because there was always something. At first, I was just a kid, and then there was the crash, and then I was about to give up, but then, that one summer, we were almost something.”

His expression—open, honest, and hurt—is something she is sure she will never forget. He is brave and stubborn. He is the boy she loves. 

Ingrid continues. “He kissed me.”

This, no one else knows—not Sylvain, not Dorothea, not even Felix. She is sure that this is a secret that only she and Glenn hold, so close to their chests as if it never happened at all. 

Sylvain’s gaze hardens before darting down at the floor. She watches his fist clench and wishes he wouldn’t do that. She wants to see the softness in his eyes again. She hates that she took it away. She barrels on anyway.

“Glenn kissed me,” Ingrid says again as Sylvain tries not to flinch. “But then...nothing. Neither of us wanted to start a relationship long-distance and we thought —well Glenn said that I should be able to experience my first year at school without being tied to something so far away and I was okay with it because I figured—well I just...I loved him for _such_ a long time, Sylvain, and a year isn’t really that much longer. I thought—I thought I wouldn’t mind waiting because I’d still love him but then...then I didn’t.”

Sylvain’s eyes meet back up with hers. The smallest sense of relief flows through her, just enough for her to inhale deeply. She had been babbling on so fast, trying to explain as much as possible as quickly as possible that she hadn’t even realized that she was running out of breath. 

“I got busy. I got focused,” she explains, slowing down. Her fingers twist together as she takes a step forward. “We stopped talking. Glenn kissed me and then we fizzled out and...I think I was hoping that maybe that would happen with you too.”

Sylvain’s jaw clenches. He opens his mouth to say something but then closes it. She holds her breath again, waiting but nothing comes. 

Her heart rams in her ears. She feels the sudden stark fear of rejection. The idea that maybe she has hurt him too much for him to want her anymore seizes her chest. She thinks, that maybe he doesn’t like this look on her, doesn’t like this ugly part of her that avoids things forever in hopes she never has to face them. Sylvain’s always said that she’s brave. Felix calls her best trait a stubborn refusal to bend in the face of weakness. Dimitri once admired her strength of heart.

This is none of those things. This is the admission of weakness in front of the man she loves. An admission that she’d been too frightened to love him and too willing to let him go.

Will he still love her now that he knows that she is none of those things? 

She breathes out slowly, collecting herself as best she can. Sylvain still deserves an answer. She scrambles for the little bits of courage in her that she once had and lets her affection for him fuel her the strength to give him the ugly truth of her cowardice.

“I thought-” she breathes out shakily, “-if could love Glenn for _years_ and then just not love him, then maybe I could do the same with you. Maybe it’d be easier. Maybe, if I didn’t love you I could refocus. I kept hoping that if we fizzled out, then maybe I wouldn’t have to regret you.”

Tears edge in, blurring her vision. Sylvain becomes hard to see but Ingrid’s afraid that if she blinks, they’ll spill. She tips her head up towards the sky instead. There’s no moon tonight, only a single dim-lit star. 

“Ingrid—” 

“—But that didn’t happen,” Ingrid cuts in, not yet ready to hear what he has to say. She stares down at his shoes. She can’t bear to see his expression, whatever it may be, but she wants him to know that she’s trying. “Glenn didn’t hurt. Not like this. It wasn’t—it wasn’t like losing something. It was more like moving on. And by the time I realized what was happening, I didn’t want him anymore. But that didn’t happen this time. I want you, Sylvain. I still want you. And I keep thinking that if I just gave it more time then I won’t anymore. Maybe we’ll be done. Maybe you won’t love me if I break your heart but then every time I think about you moving on it just—”

Ingrid bites her lip. Her gaze drops to her own sneakers, where she scuffs them into the concrete. “I don’t want you to move on,” she says quietly, unsure if he can even hear her. “Not when I’m in love with you.” 

It feels good to say so plainly. It feels real suddenly, tangible, and the release she feels from her confession rushes to her head and tingles on her skin. It’s liberating. It is enough to make her lift her head and meet Sylvain’s gaze. 

He takes her breath away. 

She can’t read his expression but she hopes, dearly hopes, that it’s relief or love and not pain or loss. 

Maybe, if she could freeze this moment, she could take it with her, even if he bristles. Even if he runs.

She thinks he won’t run. 

He won’t run. 

Will he?

His voice is so hoarse that she can hardly make out the words when he speaks. “Glenn kissed you?”

Ingrid huffs a shaky exasperated laugh. " _That’s_ what you took out of all of that? I go on this long rant about loving you and that’s what yo—”

Sylvain kisses her. Both his hands are warm against her cheeks as he holds her and breathes her in. He’s rough, pulling her towards him with an almost-growl and Ingrid can’t move, not at first—too startled by the force of which he cuts her off and steals her words right out of her mouth.

Then, before she can kiss him back, he pulls away.

“I love you,” he says against her lips as he thumbs the tears underneath her eyes. “I love you. I’m not moving on. I can’t move on. I love you.” 

“ _Sylvain_ ,” she whispers, hoping to convey everything she feels in the simple way she says his name. It is only for him, a whisper between them, lips an inch apart.

“I love you,” he says again, pulling back just enough so she can see the entirety of his face. 

He has never looked at her like this. Ingrid’s not sure he has ever looked at anything like this. It is not the soft compassionate one of the nights spent together when he steals her away from the moments where it feels like the world is pressing her into the ground that she’s grown to love. It is not the one with the gentle kind reverence or affection that she looks for. 

It is raw and hardened, like his shell has been ripped completely away to uncover how his bare heart beats, bloody and rough but steady, filled with love for her. 

He’s been holding himself back for her.

She goes to say something but nothing comes, not past her throat closing tightly at the look in his eyes that begs her to believe him. Not when he holds her like she is his whole world and, in this exact moment, she believes that she might be. 

She can’t say anything so she doesn’t. Instead, Ingrid’s hand drifts to hold his wrists before leaning back up towards him.

The relief she feels from him as they kiss extends from his lips through her whole body. She feels it in the way her toes curl, just slightly. She feels it in her heart that beats rapid-fire, and her skin that flushes warm. She feels everything when Sylvain kisses her. She feels his whole heart. 

* * *

_“So, how’s school? Midterms right?”_ Her father asks. His voice is a careful kind of casual. It’s as if he is treading softly for fear of spooking her. Ingrid pushes the churning guilt in her chest away. 

The more messages she ignored, the harder it got to pick up the phone but now that she’s here, with her father’s voice on the other side, she is reminded that, sometimes, it is much harder to start an action than it is to carry it through. 

“They were okay,” she says. It sounds lame to her own ears. She knows her father can see through it. “How about you? Are you doing anything today?"

“Oh, you know how it is,” he says kindly. “Things are busy, as they always are. I imagine it’s the same for you.” 

“Is the shop doing well?”

There’s a brief pause. “It is,” he says. There is no reason not to believe him, but Ingrid still doubts nevertheless. “Busy, as it always is, but your brother is helping now that he’s old enough.” 

“Great.” 

Ingrid frowns. She doesn’t know how to continue. Her fingers pull down the sleeves of her hoodie and she grips them tightly, stretching the material.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Her father presses. “Darling, I don’t want to push, but I can’t help but wonder.”

“I am,” she says hastily. “Or, well, I’m stressed. School stuff.”

“I see,” her father says. “Well, make sure to take a break every once in a while, okay?”

Ingrid’s hands grip hard against her phone. “I have another midterm soon.” The stress from the thought of it presses into her chest, especially given how distracted she’s been lately. “I’m not sure I can afford one.” 

“I’m not asking you to abandon your responsibilities,” her father says, sounding slightly exasperated. “But you won’t get very far or last very long if you hurt yourself in the process. Take breaks when you need to.”

Ingrid smiles wryly, even when her father can’t see it. “And here I thought school was the most important thing.”

“School is important,” her father says firmly. “Absolutely. But it won’t do you much good if you’re not happy in the end. That’s really what we want for you and your brothers, Ingrid. We want you to be happy.”

Ingrid’s thoughts drift to Samson, once more.

She pulls at her sleeve again, tugging it even further down until it stretches over her palm. Her pulse quickens, just a bit, and Ingrid breathes in deeply before she asks, “is that what you wanted for Samson?”

Her father lets out a weary loud sigh. “Samson…” he starts, sounding sad. “I was worried for him. He’s just—well you know how he is. He doesn’t always think first. He just runs into things. Sometimes he runs so far in that I’m afraid he won’t be able to find his way back.”

Her father pauses. Ingrid bites her tongue. She doesn’t know how to respond.

She hears more shuffling on the other side. She is glad, suddenly, that they aren’t on video. She thinks it would be more difficult if she had to see her father’s face staring at her. 

“I was worried,” he continues, clearing his throat. “When he said he didn’t want to go to school, I was afraid that he was going to make a huge mistake. I thought, maybe he would lock himself out of opportunities he’d want someday. I wanted him to be realistic. It’s hard out there, you know?”

Ingrid thinks, again, of her father’s hands. She thinks of them lifting inventory onto high shelves. She thinks about dreams he never talks about but that she assumes he must have once had. After all, not many people dream of a little shop in a small, quiet neighborhood. He must have dreamed for more, once. 

“I know,” Ingrid says.

“But then—” he pauses again. Ingrid straightens up. Her toes curl in her shoes. “Have you seen him lately? He looks...he looks good. Your mother shows me all those pictures that he sends her.”

“That sounds just like something Mom would do,” Ingrid says, smiling. “She’s been trying to get you two to make up for years.”

“Yes, well,” he grumbles, “we might be a bit proud.”

“Too proud.” 

“Unfortunately, that probably comes from me.”

Ingrid laughs. At least she knows where she gets it from now.

“He’s happy,” her father continues. “He’s safe and he’s happy and he’s good. That’s really all I wanted for him. We just had different ideas of how he could get there but, well, you know Samson. He’s always known what he wants and he’s always chased it. That’s not a bad thing, even when he can be a bit foolish about it sometimes.”

Ingrid sighs. She looks up at the sky. “Sometimes, I wish I was a little more like him.”

“I thank the Goddess you aren’t,” her father says, but his tone tells her he’s joking. Still, it makes her bristle. “Samson is enough of a handful.”

“Yeah,” she says. For a second, she considers leaving it there. “But, like you said, he chases after what he wants.”

Her father sounds quizzical. “Is that not what you’re doing?”

Ingrid freezes for a moment. The phone nearly slips out of her hand. “I—” she tries when she recovers, but nothing follows it.

“What’s going on, Darling?” Her father’s voice, worried but sincere, helps her find her courage again.

“I might be having trouble with that. The ‘chasing after what I want’ thing.”

“Well, what is it that you want? What makes you happy?”

Sylvain.

* * *

Sylvain retrieves his sports coat from a few steps behind him with a frown, brushing the dirt off of it as Ingrid laughs and wipes away residual tears on her sleeves. 

“You can be incredibly dramatic sometimes,” she teases when he makes his way back towards her. “You didn’t have to fling it off.” 

“I didn’t _fling it off_ ,” he defends, sounding almost annoyed. “It _fell off_ my shoulder as I made my way towards you.”

“You mean when you attacked my face?”

“You didn’t seem to have a problem with it earlier.” He shrugs before leaning towards her ear and whispering. “Want to do it again?”

Ingrid flushes and hopes she can pass it off as leftover adrenaline. Her fingers shake as she gently pushes against his chest, nudging him a little further away. “Don’t push your luck.”

He doesn’t seem disappointed. Instead, he looks at her curiously, blinking at her with a soft, warm smile. “So,” he says. “What now?”

To be honest, she hasn’t thought this far ahead. In all the rehearsing she had done in her head, she had never gotten past her confession. “I don’t know,” she admits. 

He pulls his keys out of his pocket. “Do you want to come inside?”

Her eyes dart back at the gate to the building and then down the street in the direction towards campus. She has so much to do, especially with all that time she wasted thinking about him. 

She thinks he would understand if she said no.

“Yeah,” she says anyway. “I do.”

His warm smile stretches into a full-blown grin. It makes her more certain about her choice. She doesn’t hesitate to lean into him when Sylvain throws an arm over her shoulder and guides her into his apartment.

* * *

Hey, Dorothea, I might need you to cover for me tonight.

* * *

“So,” Sylvain says, now in a pair of sweatpants and GMU hoodie. He’s standing on the other side of the counter where a giant box of pizza is set between them.

“So,” Ingrid sighs, wiping her grease-stained hands on a wet wipe. 

Sylvain tilts his head, to the side. “We should probably talk now, huh?” 

Ingrid feels like she has done a lot of talking today but inhales anyway, nodding. “Yeah,” she says. She runs a hand through her hair. “We should.”

It would be nice if things were as simple as a kiss between them—as if it could erase how she pushed him away on purpose. 

Sylvain sounds nothing but curious when he asks: “What changed?” 

Ingrid props her elbow up on the counter and leans her cheek against her hand. “Honestly, not much,” she admits. “Other than the fact that I missed you because you weren’t around.”

Sylvain looks hurt. “Yeah, but you decided that.” 

The pang of guilt she feels spreads from her chest to the drumming fingers of her free hand against the countertop. 

“I did.” She pauses. “I’m sorry.”

Sylvain shakes his head. “You don’t have to be. I understood.”

“I know.” Her eyes flit downwards back to the marble counter. “But I never wanted to hurt you. I wish...it was easy to have it all.”

“You have me.” Sylvain’s fingers scoop underneath hers and she finds her hand curling into his. “That part isn’t hard.”

“It is though. You—” She smiles, bopping him on the nose before returning her hand back into his, “—require a lot of attention and so does school. But, I think I just realized that whether or not you were right next to me, you have my attention.”

He grins at her. “Attention, huh?”

“I just wish I could give you all my attention.”

“I don’t need all your attention all the time, Ingrid,” he says. “Just...sometimes. And I know how busy you can get with school.”

“What if I’m busy forever?” Ingrid pushes. “What if I’m in school forever or even if I’m not, what if I want a career that requires all the attention in the world?” _What if I can’t give you what you need? What if it’s not enough?_

Sylvain steps around the counter, closer to her from where she sits on one of the two barstools he owns. “I’m okay with that,” he says. “Just don’t push me away again or at least...talk to me? I think as long as we keep talking, we’ll be able to figure it out.”

“I wish I had your optimism.”

“Since when have I been optimistic?”

Ingrid intends to level him with an annoyed look but when she looks up, she sees that he’s being earnest. “Lately,” she explains. “When you’re with me. You exude this positivity—like genuine positivity. Your steps are lighter.”

“Nah,” Sylvain says, waving it away. “Maybe I just learned to carry it better.” 

Ingrid smiles. “I’m glad.”

“Or maybe it’s only when I’m around you,” he mumbles. 

Ingrid frowns and glances down at their hands, joined together. It anchors her. “I think I’m afraid that I won’t be enough for you.”

“Why would you think that?”

She bites her lip. An insecurity she has refused to name comes crawling up again. “You just...you seemed fine without me. You are fine without me.”

The grip in her hand tightens. “I’m miserable without you,” he says fiercely. “But you asked for space and I wasn’t going to...I know you, Ingrid. And you can’t blame yourself for putting yourself first for once, even if that means stepping away from me. I wasn’t going to—” Sylvain’s eyebrows furrow “—I didn’t want you to feel guilty about it. Not when I know you have other more important things to worry about. But, I love you and...yeah, I think I can learn to be fine without you but I don’t want to be. Without you, I mean.” 

Ingrid blinks up at him. She’s too tired to cry anymore than she has. Sylvain’s eyes, though, are shining. “I love you,” she assures. “I’m sorry I made you miserable—”

“It’s not your fault—”

“It is,” Ingrid insists. She lifts the hand that was holding her head up and stretches out towards his face, feeling the need to touch him, to keep him closer. “I don’t really want space. I thought I needed it but lately, I’ve been realizing the things I thought needed...well maybe I don’t need them anymore. Maybe I don’t want them anymore. I still have to figure that out.”

He smiles at her, shy. “You still want me?”

“Yes,” she tells him, leaning forward to catch his lips, soft and quick, before pulling back. “But I’m still...trying to work through everything. I just...maybe it’ll be easier if you’re there to work through it with me?”

“I’m happy to,” he says. 

“But you have to promise me something,” she says.

“What?”

“Stop—” she runs a hand through her hair with a huff “—don’t hide things for my sake. If I’m leaning on you, you should lean on me too.”

He frowns. “I have, for a long time I have. You were always looking out for me when we were kids. I just...wanted to give a little bit of that back.”

Ingrid furrows her brow the same time Sylvain frowns.

“That’s not really great is it?” he realizes with a sigh. It’s as if saying it out loud really made them both consider the way that sounds. “Counting it like that. Like we owe each other something.”

Ingrid’s mouth twists downward. “Probably not,” she admits. “But I also can’t claim I know what I’m doing, especially in regards to...this.”

“Our relationship you mean?” he asks. The hand not already holding hers finds her other one. “I’m not exactly an expert either.”

“We might need to redefine how we think of things,” Ingrid says. “Maybe it’s less about how much we lean on the other and more like we both need to...not be afraid of it.”

“Are you afraid of me?” 

“I think that’s part of it.” She watches Sylvain’s frown deepen. “Not of you,” she corrects, noting his reaction. “Just...love itself. Glenn was different because, well, honestly, I never thought he’d ever reciprocate until he did and even then, it wasn’t like he felt the way I did—”

“He did.” Sylvain sighs.

Ingrid blinks, too startled to stop him from breaking one hand away from her to run through his hair. “What?”

“We talked about you a lot,” Sylvain admits. “He did. I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you.” 

“Oh.”

Sylvain tries to pull away more but this time Ingrid catches him before he can. “Sylvain—”

He huffs. “He was in love with you. Especially that summer. He just...loved you enough to let you go.” 

“Oh.” 

“I did too.”

Ingrid bolts out of her seat. “What?”

“He’s my friend,” Sylvain says. “And I knew how you felt about him so I thought—well it doesn’t really matter what I thought—but yeah, anyway, he loved you.”

Ingrid is quiet for a moment, letting the revelation sink in. She wonders how she should feel about this. If, maybe, she should be sad about some form of future lost or elated that her feelings were not in vain. 

Sylvain’s fingers curl against her hands.

“It doesn’t change anything,” she decides. “You’re the one I want.”

Sylvain closes his eyes and nods. “Okay,” he says, breathlessly. It seems like it’s more to himself than her. “Okay.”

“Have you been carrying that around all this time?” she asks. 

Sylvain smiles at her, sheepish at his confession. “Seems kind of silly now doesn’t it?”

“No,” she says, “not at all. Do you trust me?”

Sylvain nods. “Yeah,” he says softly. “Do you trust me?”

Ingrid steps into his space, feels his hand come to rest on her hips. “Yes.” She says, peering up at him, “I do.”

Sylvain leans down and gives her the sweetest kiss she’s ever had before tucking her into his chest, where she fits comfortably. From this position, she can feel the rapid beating of his heart mixed in with his quiet breath.

* * *

They fall asleep on his couch, curled up together in front of a blue blinking television screen from a movie they never really got around to properly watching. Instead, they spent the rest of the night talking.

She realized something over the course of the night, through all the different and many conversations she’s had, not just with Sylvain but with all the people in her life over the last few days.

Ingrid is terrified of being a disappointment. She had been so afraid that she could not be what Sylvain needs or wants that she thought it might be easier if she never tried in the first place.

Because he can’t break her heart if she doesn’t try. She just hadn’t really accounted for breaking her own heart through the act of breaking his.

She’s still afraid honestly. She’s afraid he’ll decide it’s not worth it or that it’ll still fall apart because she still does have to try to juggle school and her relationships. It’s just that, right now, wrapped up in his arms as he sleeps she can’t imagine doing anything else but press further into his chest while the first hint of morning breaks with the soft glow of light through Sylvain’s apartment window panes. It feels safe. It makes all those fears a little more manageable. 

There is no sense in being miserable when she doesn’t have to be. Not about this. Not about Sylvain.

It seems silly in retrospect that fear held her away from him. She doesn’t know why her mind had conflated it so that it had to be school or Sylvain. Perhaps it’s what Mercedes had said, that all that stress about school and the future projected itself into this thing with Sylvain she couldn’t parse out, or because she had never given herself the time to truly consider it.

The answer seems so simple now.

She didn’t want to disappoint Sylvain. She had been terrified of loving him and then losing him.

Pushing him away made sense under the moonlight when they were the only two people in the world, a feeling aided by the fear of falling harder and the dread of a future she could not see without him.

But the truth is, Ingrid had never imagined a future without him. Not once. 

She just never thought that it would mean in this way: that a future with Sylvain meant one in which he holds her hands, kisses her, loves her like this. 

She wasn’t lying when she said that not much has changed really. Her future is still a hazy fog of unclear roads. It makes her dizzy. When she thinks about it too hard, her eyes clench and fear still catches in her chest, forcing all the air out in short bursts of harsh, clipped breaths, but then, in Sylvain’s arms with his lips buried into her hair, it eases again.

When Ingrid blinks her eyes open again, she sees that he’s peering down at her with lazy eyes and the softest smile on his face. 

“How long have you been up?” she asks.

“Not long,” he tells her. Ingrid’s not entirely sure she believes him. 

She crawls off of him into a sitting position and stretches with a yawn. He rises too but then promptly buries his nose into her neck, his arms snaking around her waist.

Ingrid is quickly discovering exactly how affectionate Sylvan can be. She’s surprised that she doesn’t mind it, although she does still flush a bit, not quite used to how his lips feel against her skin. 

“Sylvain,” she warns but she doesn’t push him away. 

“Yes?” he murmurs, making her shiver. She feels his smirk. 

“I have to get back to campus,” she says. “I promised I’d meet Dimitri today.” 

He rests his head on her shoulder. “Okay,” he mumbles without moving.

“Do you want to come?”

He lifts his head and grins too brightly. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” 

“I’d love to.” 

* * *

**  
**

The walk to campus from the bus stop isn’t a particularly long one, but they stop for coffee and breakfast on the way and by the time they start heading over, it’s already mid-morning. Ingrid thanks the Goddess that it’s a Saturday. 

“Hey,” Sylvain says suddenly, tugging the hand of hers he holds and stopping abruptly.

She turns towards him in the middle of this empty sidewalk on some random residential street.

“We’re going to try this, right?” he says. “You and me? And you’re not going to freak out the second you walk back onto campus and remember all the things you have to do?”

Ingrid thinks about the work she put off yesterday to spend the night with him. “I might freak out when I walk onto campus,” she admits. “But we’re going to try this. If you still want to.”

He nods quickly and so vigorously that she laughs. 

“Goddess,” Ingrid breathes, bringing the hand not holding his up to rub at her face before dropping it back to her side. “I have so _so_ much I have to do.” 

Sylvain gives her a sympathetic look. “I wish I could take that away from you.”

“You have,” she says. “I mean, not school or anything but I learned something this week, I think.”

“I hope so.” He grins, “those classes are expensi— _ow!_ ”

Ingrid smacks him on the arm. “I learned,” she continues as if he hadn’t started joking, “that none of that stress is just going to go away, but if I’ve got you and everyone else, then maybe I can at least still move forward? Even if I have absolutely no idea what I’m moving towards. Is that too cheesy? That’s pretty cheesy isn’t it?”

“It’s a little cheesy,” Sylvain laughs. “But, hey, how are you feeling?”

“Better?” Ingrid says. “Less like I’m falling apart or maybe I’ve just hit the acceptance of the fact that I’ll probably always be falling apart in some way.”

“So you’ve finally hit the ‘it’s okay not to be okay’ thing, huh?”

Ingrid huffs, annoyed. “How long did it take you?”

Sylvain shrugs. “My whole life probably. It still comes and goes. Taking a step back helps.”

“Is that why you keep trying to steal me away?” Ingrid asks. “So that I can take a step back?”

The glint in his eye is mischievous. “Sure, let’s go with that.”

She laughs as she tugs him towards her a bit too forcefully—forcefully enough that he nearly stumbles into her. “And if we don’t?”

“We can call it seduction.”

She snorts and pats him on the cheek. “Let’s go with the first one,” she says. “So, it comes and goes?”

Sylvain’s hand breaks away from hers so he can wrap an arm around her waist. Her arm, in return, finds a comfortable place around his neck. She’s aware that they’re in broad daylight, only a few blocks away from campus.

“Things don’t stay good and they don’t stay bad,” he murmurs. “I just know that I like the way I feel when I’m with you. I think you like the way you feel when you’re with me. So, yeah, it comes and it goes. Sometimes I have to remind myself of something I already know. Sometimes, you’re the one who reminds me.”

“Are you okay?” Ingrid asks. “We keep talking about me.”

Sylvain chews his bottom lip. “I am,” he says, “These days, yeah, I’m doing pretty well. Well, I mean, last week sucked—” Ingrid winces, feeling that guilt creep up again “—but now that I’m with the girl I love, I feel like I can do anything but I can go back to angsty if you want. Dredge up some old fatherly drama if you want to be miserable together.”

She pinches his cheek. “Stop that,” she scolds even when he smiles. “But, you joking about it at least shows some sense of self-awareness.”

“Only today,” he says. “Look, Ingrid. All that stuff that we both have to deal with. It’s still going to be there. I’m just happy that I get to figure it out with you.” 

Ingrid smiles before her lips twist towards a teasing smirk. “I think Mercedes beat you to it actually.”

“What?” he says, mockingly offended.

“And Dorothea and Annette, oh and Felix and—you know Dimitri brought me some tea and—”

He cuts her off with a kiss. 

* * *

_“I’m not sure,”_ she answers, too embarrassed to admit that Sylvain makes her happy to her father. 

“It’s okay not to be sure," her father says. “We can’t all be like Samson but take some time, think it through, and figure out what makes you happy. The rest we can do together.”

Her father’s words warm her chest but her fear stymies it a little. “What if it takes too long?”

“It’ll take however long you need,” he says. “Things don’t happen overnight. They take time to build but we do it in little steps. Eventually, when you look back, you’ll see how far you’ve gone.”

“What if it’s in the wrong direction?”

“Then you’ll course correct. No matter what happens Darling, your mother and I love you all the same.” 

“I just—” she sighs, “I don’t want to disappoint you.” 

“Not possible,” her father says. “Not for a second have you ever done anything to make me anything less than proud. You are brilliant, my Darling girl, no matter what you do, no matter what you choose, you will always be perfect.” 

“It’s a lot of pressure to be perfect, Dad.” 

The line is quiet for a moment. She hears her father breathe out. “Oh, Ingrid,” he says quietly, “I never meant to pressure you. What I was trying to say was that you’re already perfect. You don’t have to be anything other than yourself.”

She gives a forced little laugh. “That’s a little hard to believe. After everything with Samson.” 

“I didn’t handle Samson well,” he admits. “And your brother and I still have some things to work out but I mean it when I said I want you to be happy. I want you all to be happy. That’s all your mother and I can really ask for.”

“What if the thing that makes me happy, isn’t the thing that makes you proud?”

“I’ll be proud of your happiness,” he says. “And I’ll work on finding ways to prove it as long as you work on figuring out what you want out of life. How’s that?”

Ingrid closes her eyes and breathes in deeply. She lets her hands uncurl around the sleeve that it had been gripping tight and relaxes. “Yeah,” she exhales quietly, “okay. I think we can give that a try.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been fiddling with this one specific chapter since October and we've come to a point where I'm just going to have to call it done. You have no idea how many times I nearly canned this specific chapter. I wouldn't have made it here if not for the support of my [beta](https://twitter.com/nicolewrites37), [my artist](https://twitter.com/artsy_oleander), [Kaerra](https://twitter.com/Kaerra3) who gave me a much needed pep talk for this specific chapter, and all of my friends from the sylvgrid discord who talked me down from so many writing ledges, and you! Thank you so much for reading. 
> 
> The reception to this fic was more than I ever expected and y'all have made all the yelling, cursing, and staring at squiggly lines on a white sheet entirely worth it.
> 
> Thank you for reading that one silly YA novel I never planned to write. It's been a blast.
> 
> Also, check out the [Big Bang](https://twitter.com/home) on twitter for the other fics and the [collection](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/SylvgridBigBang) for other works!


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